#lunasona

#6 - Ice

“It’s just so rare that someone can resist your charms,” Jose says a week in, clearly enjoying the show.

Rusca is glowering at him. “Well, she’s a rare person, I’ll grant you that.”

#7 - Dance

“Maybe instead of breaking down her walls, you should try to understand why they exist,” Jose had advised him. So he spends today staying out of her way, trying to find vantage points where he can watch her.

By nightfall, she’s the one who’s watching him.

#8 - Promise

“You swear not to tell anyone about this,” Rusca says through gritted teeth, as she squeezes aloe sap onto the sunburn marks on his back.

“I swear,” Leriang says, and he thinks she might be smirking but his neck burns too much for him to turn and check.

It’s the first of many secrets they will keep together.

#9 - Wait

He likes to think he’s quick on his feet. She likes to inform him he’s just rash, and impatient, and por dios, por santo, Rusca, I told you so.

#10 - Candle

He doesn’t mind studying by candlelight, but he tries to read everything he needs before sunset so it takes longer to deplete his stash.

The following night, she runs out of candles.

He discovers he doesn’t mind studying by moonlight.

#11 - Talent

Somewhere in the Academia was a piece of paper detailing the weekly outcomes of the ongoing bet on Rusca and Sentido’s shooting scores.

#12 - Talk

They get to know each other best on the nights they’re on patrol; their feet trace the perimeter, their words map out their souls.

#13 - Dream

“If it weren’t for the war, I’d be a baker,” he confides. “I’d run my father’s panaderia and eat as much as I’d sell. And you?”

“If it weren’t for the war,” she replies, “I would know.”

#14 - Mask

I’m literally wearing somebody else’s face, Rusca thinks with a scowl as he trudges his way to the river.

#15 - Run

He admired the sight of her when she ran, all clean lines and sure steps and braid flying in the wind, but he never fully appreciated the reality of it until she was running to him.

#16 - Storm

They say like called to like, so maybe it was the rushing water of the river that called her tears to the surface, the current of emotion sweeping them both away.

#17 - Farewells

She had been terrified of the idea of her brother dying, which is why she had refused to say goodbye, and later regretted it. Now she’s twice as paranoid, because bidding Rusca goodbye so they would regret nothing if they died meant accepting that was a possibility.

#18 - Fall

He got tossed off his horse’s back when he was a young rider, and he remembered the shock of suddenly being aloft, the thrill of almost believing he could fly, and dreading the bone-crushing thud of the landing he knew would eventually come.

Being in love with Leriang was much the same.

#19 - Wings

If she only allowed it, her heart could probably soar above the mountaintops and leave the misery of the trenches behind—and that is the precise reason why she doesn’t.

#20 - Temptation

Jose is away for the night, and he’s miserably proud of his effort to resist inviting her into their hut.

She undoes it all by coming anyway.

#21 - Midnight

“Mahal kita,” she says after several minutes of silence, testing the words out on her tongue.

He responds with a resounding snore, and she lets out the breath she’s holding.

Maybe that’s just as well.

#22 - World

American, Spaniard, Filipino—they sweated and cried and bled out when they died all the same. To Rusca, it didn’t matter what color your balls were if they didn’t keep you alive in the trenches.

#23 - Laugh

He laughs in the face of death. Some people feel like he’s stupid, he’s annoying, he’s disrespectful, he’s crazy.

“That’s fine with me,” he tells her when she points it out to him. “The important thing is that they no longer feel fear.”

#24 – Cover

They cut through the chaos of their invaded campsite back to back, and though this is the closest to the enemy they have ever been, neither of them are afraid.

#25 - Fire

One moment she was a girl with a long, thick braid, the next she was a human candle with a burning wick.

#26 - Drink

Leriang teases him all the time about his habit of pilfering the heneral’s unfinished drinks; he retorts that maybe military brilliance rubs off on people that way and he’s not taking any chances.

#27 - Music

He’s heard her sing, of course, but he prefers the arpeggio of her laughter.

#28 – Gravity

The first time she met Gregorio del Pilar was also the first time she saw Rusca in that crisp white undershirt she liked so much, and the distinction in how the two images appealed to her was the only reason Del Pilar figured in the memory at all.

#29 - Formal

She imagines him, just the one time, in the white dress uniform Roman and Luna wear to cabinet meetings.

#30 - Eclipse

She slides up his body slowly, slowly, until the crown of her head blots out the sun completely and her lips, wet with his arousal, crash down on his.

#31 - Silk

In her hands, she thinks of him as silk wrapped around steel; in her, he thinks of her as silk enveloping velvet.

#32 - Body

They were never more aware of each other’s anatomy as that time during roll call when they belatedly realized they had accidentally exchanged uniforms.

#33 - Sacred

They are married in naught but their uniforms and flowers picked from the summer fields, bound by the two things they believed most in—duty and hope.

#34 - Forever

“Mahal kita.”

“Mahal kita.”

“Mahal kita.”

“Mahal kita.”

“Mahal kita.”

“Mahal. Kita.”

“Mahal.”

“Kita.”

#35 – Highway

It’s a long ride to Cabanatuan, and already Rusca has finished off three pieces of suman, cussed out the Spanish, led the regiment in a ribald marching song, cussed out the Americans, none too quietly declared that he loved her (no less than seven times), cussed out the Kawit brigade, and made the heneral laugh and Koronel Roman frown disapprovingly and Joven blush and Kumandante Bernal roll his eyes and Jose turn to her and ask what a nabo was.

She loves him, but dear God, can’t they just get there already—

#36 - Red

Red like the sky over Cabanatuan, red like blood, red like the traitors’ clothes.

#37 - Overwhelmed

He could say that he ran out of options, that they outnumbered him, that the wise thing to do was cooperate until he could get away from his captors (all true), but the fact was that he just didn’t know what else to do.

#38 - Silence

About the bodies of Heneral Luna and Koronel Roman, everyone had a story to tell, but as for the whereabouts of Kapitan Rusca, no one could give her an answer.

#39 - Journey

For many nights, Leriang didn’t know whether to wish he had not gone at all or that she had gone and perished with them.

#40 - Hope

Until there’s a body to bury, her hopes refuse to die.

#41 - Whisper

The younger Nable Jose girl is soft-spoken, but she might as well have been shouting the words in Leriang’s face—RUSCA’S ALIVE, RUSCA’S ALIVE, RUSCA’S ALIVE.

#42 - Lock

As the Nable Jose girl fumbles for the key, it hits her like a full chamber of bullets that this door is all that stands between them now.

#43 - Fever

In his delirious haze, this is what he lets slip: “Leriang.”

In his wildest dreams, this is what he doesn’t expect to hear: “Yes?”

#44 – Breathe

Leriang’s heart might as well have stopped beating and Rusca’s ribs are too broken for a full breath, but the moment that their hands touch again is the one where they both return to life.

#45 - Search

They shot Jose in the middle of a busy plaza, with dozens of townspeople milling about under the bright noontime sun.

Huddled close in their unassuming little hut in the middle of the night, she’s sure someone will come for them too.

#46 - Forgotten

There were five candles on the stoop when she wakes on Undas morning.

“Your brother too,” he explains.

#47 - Lies

By chance, they see Aguinaldo one last time before the country falls to America.

In the thick of the crowd they grip each other’s hand tightly, both holding the other back from putting a bullet through the president’s false heart.

#48 – Unknown

“What will you do now? He asks one evening as she carries in the last of their wares. The smell of the bread he made himself comforts him after years of being followed by the stench of death.

He knows though, that the absence of it disorients her. “I suppose we’ll find out.”

#49 - Cold

“Cold,” Rusca would tell the man who had come asking him what Pangasinan had been like decades later, remembering the hard stone floor beneath his knees and the steel shackles around his wrists as he prayed for daylight.

#50 - Memory