The two PFCs were scheduled to depart the larger base in two weeks. Outside of basic drills and daily checkups at the hospital to make sure the perforations they’d suffered weren’t growing into a far reaching mind-control piloted by foreign shards of bone, the boys had been permitted a large amount of leisure time. Kasse felt particularly at home exploring disused buildings, break-and-enter autonomy something he’d been missing in the rigid structure of military life.

One stray-dog boy was always leading his better-raised friend past doors they should have kept out of, past fences covered in warnings, advisory notices and condemned-building proclamations. Domesticated things generally heeded signs, or, at the very least, considered the repercussions of lawbreaking, but Kasse had grown up ignoring caution because trespassers-will-be-prosecuted made tame things fearful of reprimand—

guaranteed more feral things some fleeting promise of safety.

“Don’t worry so much,” the boy whispered to his friend out past the fences marking the boundaries of base. Already, they were approaching the door to a shelled out school building that had, at some point, been boarded up and fortified to serve as a bunker. Dry vines and desert vegetation had already taken root along its concrete angles, tree branches peeked out of half shattered windows, a brawling mix of Ossan and Amsteadean graffiti scrawled in colourful lengths up every utilitarian surface. He was already pulling a flashlight out of his pocket when he looked up at Eoran, bright eyed in the arid warmth of the desert’s outer reaches. “We’ll be fine. I promise. I just really want to know what’s in here.”

"I'm just letting it be known that if I step on a nail or cut myself on a piece of scrap metal and have to get a tetanus shot in my ass, I'm going to be so fucking sad." Eoran's volley was sharp but ultimately lighthearted, playful in the way it fit around a crescent-shaped smile highlighted by the moonlit glow of his willfully complicit visage. After his stint in the hospital, the boy was tired of shots. He was not, however, tired of being pulled beyond the warnings of sign-promised danger by the whims of his best friend.

He sure was cautious, though. Eoran's mother had always been very strict with her two children when they were growing up—curfew was enforced with an iron fist and, when broken, there was always a rage unlike any other to suffer through. This meant the youngest in the Toriet line usually paid mind to the constraints placed around his youth. Yes, he skipped school a good number of times to hang out with friends and fuck around town and scam sips of booze from countless 'uncles' drunk in afternoon-soaked alleyways and shooting dice, but that was daytime. When he didn't have to be accounted for, when the nanas he begged not to tell on him manned their own vigils between the raucous bickering of Ara Me Va reruns. Port Haven’s night was a different story. Figures cloaked in shadow stalked the streets looking for prey—bloodwrights, unregistered anomalies—and if the streets were too dark for witnesses, then who was to know when someone went missing in the first place?

So of course all this dissent made Eoran nervous. He was in a war zone now. What if there were undetonated ordinances hanging about? What if they stumbled upon an unknown splinter of insurgency? The land was dead and the night was silent, but his heart still beat like a drum in his chest.

"I didn't even know this place was over here," the younger boy idly commented, eyes scrolling over a plaque of text in his heritage's tongue, gold letters barely alight, "I should maybe start paying attention more."

The slightly older boy, impermanent thing, seemed far less concerned with trivial things like curfews and scrap metal and tetanus shots. He was focused, trained and intent on spending as much time as possible with Eoran, away from eyes that’d report them for fraternizing.

“Don’t feel bad,” Kasse mused as he pulled Eoran toward the heavy door, barred and sealed from the outside. “I’m always looking for places to hide. Kind of a habit, I guess.”

"I am pretty excited to see what an Ossan school looks like," Eoran reassured as he was guided, entirely trusting in the hand holding his own. "It's kinda weird to say, or morbid maybe, but these past few weeks have given me a strange sort of glimpse into how my parents were raised? Once out of Ossa, they never went back to visit. It's neat to see things with my own eyes, rather than through bootlegged, half-scrambled TV channels."

“You ever thought of living in Ossa? I mean like. Way up north, past the mountains.” At this point, pulling Eo through objects had become the norm, so Kasse didn’t bother warning his companion when they passed through the door into an echoing tomb of school desks and blackboards—but even so, the ghost couldn’t help but grin whenever he pulled his best friend through, like the secret they shared was some precious reminder of them as them, a moment tucked safe into the cellophane front of every pack of cigarettes he opened since the greenhouse. Flashlight flicked on with a click, the boy immediately honed in on the staircase, picking his way across the debris strewn atrium. Ever observant, he was keen to drop any nails he saw through the floor.

He didn’t really want Eo to get a tetanus shot.

The bloodwright shook his head. “No. Not really. I kinda just figured that once I got out of here, I’d go back to Port Haven with a little money in my pockets so I can help support my parents. They’ve pretty much worked themselves most of the way into the ground to make shit happen for my brother and I, so I guess it’s the least I could do.” It didn’t even faze Eoran—their ritual in exploration, feet working their way to the top so they could take each floor apart on their way back down; pick through the clay streaked remnants of what once was with curious minds and pickpocket hands.

“Besides, Amstead’s supposed to be the land of opportunity,” sarcasm curdled his words, “And maybe there won’t even be a separate Ossa in a few years, if our units keep getting sent that way... north.”

Between floors, Eoran ran his hand along the wall of a landing, rigid concrete scraping rough against his fingertips. “Do you like it here? Your grasp on the language is pretty good, I think.”

"I like that there's distance between things," Kasse said when he got to the second floor landing. He leaned into a railing that groaned beneath the stress of him, complaint loud and jarring in the impenetrable dark, a rift of eeriness in that vaulted silence. "It actually gets dark out here. There's little pockets of quiet. I really like just looking out into open space, feeling like I could just walk in a direction for an hour and not find anyone—except maybe you, I guess. You'd come find me, yeah?" Kasse smirked because he knew Eoran would. His torch's beam bounced off the flaking paint to dimly illuminate him, incandescent and aglow in his callow infatuation. He'd tried playing aloof earlier in the week but it seemed contrived ever since they'd broken into the greenhouse together. Why play when Eo knew him full well? "I don't think I'm claustrophobic or anything but I guess I'm afraid of being trapped."

When Eoran caught up, the ghost acted as though he might linger, to tempt contact but he thought better of it.

He really wanted to get up to that roof.

"And I'll never be able to speak Ossan," he admitted as he started the next flight. "Understand it, maybe, but speak it? I can't string words along like that. It's really beautiful, like… when you talk, I can learn so much about you and the way you think from the words you weave together to make a phrase. I really like hearing your voice."

Eo smiled, an assiduous thing always chasing closer. His pace was improving, caught by a focus that was steadily drawing away his interest in happenstance and the dusty spread of yesterday. He was present and persistent, keen-eyed wonder on the heels of his now. Before, later—they mattered less and less.

"It is pretty unreal how dark it gets out here." The heels of the younger PFC’s boots gave away his pursuit in uniform measure. "I've never experienced anything like it, the way it envelops and makes the edges of everything dissipate until I don't really know where my fingers or arms are and I could be anywhere and I'm convinced that the colors of morning are going to illuminate a new scene. I guess maybe it's disappointing that it's always just the same old tent or barracks, green and dreary, cold grey concrete... but then I see you in your bunk and I remember it's not so bad."

His gaze was focused on the shape of Kasse ahead of him. "Do you have a favorite type of place to break into? Are there places where you won't go no matter how inviting they look?" Eo asked a lot of questions but they were necessary steps toward his larger goal: memorizing that boy he so adored, knowing every infinitesimal scrap of his existence.

“Libraries,” the ghost said without hesitation. “If we didn’t have anywhere to go, me and Lia would break into the library. I always felt safe, there.”

Past the third floor landing, the stairs thinned out to a rusted access staircase leading up into total darkness, the only indication of an end a faint rectangle of moonlight breaching the door’s blockade. He trained his flashlight on the stairs so Eoran would be able to see where to step on shifting metal all creaks and groans. “I guess we didn’t go into power generators, anywhere there was a ton of electricity just free floating. It messed with my head. I don’t really know what my utility does—I don’t think that it’s something I could ever really learn on my own. But I guess it has something to do with EMF fields? I’ve shut down a block’s power grid on accident when I got upset once. Lia said it was some spooky bullshit.”

Shining his flashlight up when he got to the top of the steps, the older boy finally betrayed his ploy: he dropped a light pack from an open ventilation duct overhead. Slinging the pack over his shoulder, the boy turned, torch pointed to the wall to tangentially illuminate his companion.

“I might have been here before...” Sheepish, Kasse bit his lip. The dark concealed his flush, but the tilt of his head consistently gave that naive thing away.

"Oh." Eoran's surprise was subdued. It was the sort that cast him in a fair impression of pleasant rather than dismayed, visible only in the quickly passing furrow of his brows. Drenched in the given glow of the offset lamp, the boy met his friend at the uppermost exit to hurry him along; to usher him through so he could see what was so special about this place that it required planning.

Kasse had him guessing, mind working through a slipshod scramble of thought to piece together parts of a puzzle he couldn't see. Anything could be in that bag, but Eoran anticipated the most likely option: that the bag was chock full of chips and candy pilfered from the commissary. It was maybe his second favorite grift between them—junk food still paled in comparison to being stolen away in the night.

"Well, don't keep me waiting, I want to see what you have." His hand met Kasse's shoulder in tame urging.

Narrow eyed and sly with that fox grin like a knife, Kasse was quick to accommodate. He pulled the bloodwright from the darkness into the night bathed in silver, their world nothing more than the stark penumbra of the moon.

The rooftop was mostly featureless, save for a row of ancient AC units long dead and a squat, windowless maintenance structure marred by fading graffiti, a boiler room or maybe electrical center for the now defunct school. The metal door was dented in, probably from some effort to remove a squatter long gone, the only evidence of a life spilling out in crushed soda cans through breaks in the entryway. Along one side was another rickety staircase, oxidized till the metal was a brittle celadon plagued in rust, all spider veins and clots—that’s where Kasse headed, tugging his friend past crumbling satellite receivers and toppled radio transmitters, over electrical lines like littered eels across the floor, up the staircase and onto the roof of that makeshift overlook. Surrounded on all sides by three feet of cinderblock breastwork and the meager remnants of a chain link fence only holding its form on one of the outer corners, Kasse set his pack down on the pitted cement of one of the containing walls. He pulled out a beer and held it out to his friend.

“Sorry it’s warm,” he said, strangely demure for someone who was just handing over a can of cheap booze, chin tucked and gaze restless. “But it’s still something, right?”

"It's great," Eoran grinned. "Thanks, Kasse."

The can hissed into the night as it was cracked open. Eoran didn't linger in one place for too long, directed by his sudden preoccupation with the unobstructed view of the desert after dark, lit from above in long sheets of periwinkle ebbing and flowing to the thoughtless caressing of lazy cloudforms sprawling across the heavens above. A patchwork of stars spread from the stilly circlet of upper atmospheric ice crystals like a colure of some mystical importance, blinking unto the horizon’s unsure line dotted with faraway civilizations or celestial fires or some strange combination of both. Their base twinkled a ways behind them, lights low and restless motions ceased for slumber.

Beer in hand, Eoran leaned his forearms on the block-bound railing. His eyes traced over unmoving humps of boulders scattered in the sand, shadows falling to the ground in long, uniform lines. Desert vegetation was turned stationary, midday movements ceased for the intimacy of obscurity. From their vantage point Eoran could see a heaping mess of interlaced twig-balls, haphazardly blown into a pile by an erstwhile giant's breath.

The night was cool and the dark-eyed soldier drew in a long breath. Whatever annihilation had come to this town ages ago had stabilized and taken root. The air was crisp and fresh and Eo was happy to drink it in.

"This is a really good spot,” he said, pushing away from the wall to turn back to his companion. In moments like these Eo spoke easy, free, like it was only ever the two of them breaking the emptiness of Ossa at its most silent.

“Yeah—” Kasse replied, his own beer hissing open with a pop, a brisk nervous swallow delaying his prerogative. He hadn’t unpacked whatever else he'd brought, but it wasn’t important. He focused on his friend, mouth suddenly so very fucking dry. “It’s really open up here. Like nothing matters but the horizon. And I really wanted you to see this with me. To be here with me.” Putting his drink down on the partition, his aura retched, nervous in the tremolo pitch of all his adoring, he looped his fingers through Eoran’s, looking up at him from the lowered cant of his impure head. “Eo… if I asked you to do something for me, would you do it?”