#talkinhank

“And we just have to sit here. With her. It’s bad enough she’s walking free, it’s bad enough we have to work with her, but now we’re doing ‘down time’ with her too?”

“Preaching to the choir, kid.” Holliday sipped her beer.

Initially, Holliday’s badge glittering openly had made Pocket just as nervous as the war criminal they had to share a bar with. But they were now a few drinks deep themself, were 80% sure she wasn’t on their father’s payroll, and had decided she had a reserved yet straightforward disposition that made her easy to talk to. Or at least bitch with.

“It’s terrible,” they went on, their own beer going straight to their cheeks.

“Nothin’ we can do about it ‘til the Ritual’s over.”

“It’s just ridiculous that such a horrible, amoral woman can have such huge tits.”

“What,” Holliday said.

“What,” Pocket said. “H-hey! Don’t look at me like that! You were staring at them too!”

“I was not.”

Jezebel’s clattered with revelry and clinking glasses. A purple trail of light zig-zagged outside the window before disappearing into the night.

“Well now you’re staring at them,” Pocket said.

“Only ‘cause you pointed them out!” Holliday stopped with her tankard halfway lifted, probably because if she attempted a quaff right now it’d go right down her front. “…Christ.”

That about surmised it, yeah. Denim straps were freed from shoulders, dangling from hips, sultry as lingerie peeking from a closed drawer. They had absolved their responsibility to the overall’s bib, which now flapped forward onto McGinnis’ waist, ventilation in the swelter of the bar which itself fought back the chill of outside. The breasts jostled each other to see which could spill out into the light cotton shirt more cheekily.

Pocket found themself in the state one gets after a night of good clean fun, forgetting to speak for minutes at a time. Sometimes longer. And then sometimes forget the people around them couldn’t hear the little internal conversation they were having the whole time.

“The things she’s been allowed to get away with,” they said randomly. “When I get control of Fairfax, she’ll be the first one to go.”

“Might not want to say that to her,” Infernus said. “She might reconsider the whole helping you get your wish thing.”

Pocket jumped. Holliday’s seat was empty and they had no idea it’d been like that. They scanned the bar for her, simultaneously trying to process what Infernus had just said and also maybe considering asking for another drink since Hank was footing the bill after all, when they spied her making her way toward the cluster of tables.

With the certainty of someone who’d just received a religious revelation, they thought, she’s going to make a move on McGinnis!

Wait what? a more sane part of them asked. What was that. Why would we care?

Too late! Moving!

And they were, the stool they left behind considering its options for a few moments before landing on all four legs.

So many bodies. So many people out of options, whose only course of action was to put their trust in something from the outer planes. No, more specific than that, Pocket had spent years with no home and no options themself, and knew there were plenty of people whose problems could only be solved through divine intervention. This bar was jam-packed with the specific set of people who were both at the end of the rope and were uniquely good at killing.

They beat Holliday to McGinnis’ table. How, they weren’t sure, but the sheriff was already fading from their mind when confronted with the eager puppies climbing out of Maggie’s shirt.

“You,” pointing, slurring, “are an awful person. You wasted all your genius building weapons for Fairfax and you don’t even have the decency to feel bad about it. People die every day, here, the rest of the world, places you don’t even think about, mowed down by your guns. How do you-?” They gripped the table to keep from teetering sideways. “How you live with yourself?”

One elbow reached back, resting easily, supporting the top-heavy engineer as she smirked unconcerned. Her confidence sickened them.

“Hey,” McGinnis said, “I know how it is. Listen kid I got,” she checked her watch, “forty minutes until my next shift. You want a quickie in the bathroom, time’s yours.”

You are a disgusting human being. I hate everything you stand for, they thought. They said, “Oh god. Please.”

It was embarrassing how fast they got their hands under her shirt. The entanglement didn’t even make it to the bathroom — occupied — instead stumbling out into the back alley, settling for a freezing cold lack of privacy to enmesh their tongues in. Kissing her seemed even more of a moral failing. Fucking Margret McGinnis was bad enough, but putting their tongue down her throat? She gripped the back of their neck like she knew.

McGinnis landed on her back, Pocket swinging one leg over her wide stomach. The layer of blue popped open with no problem, but the undershirt they had to pull over her head. She lazily extended her arms, grinning all the while.

If you got it, flaunt it, some part of Pocket said, which they told to shut up.

The tits were more magnificent unveiled than they were taunting Pocket from across the bar. They sagged to either side, large enough to nearly touch the ground via the path of McGinnis’ ribcage.

“Why aren’t you wearing a bra?” they moaned.

“Hurts my back. Just like carrying this team all the time does.”

So weighed down by their own mass, they were taut at her sternum, and when Pocket leaned forward to bury their face between them they were met with only bone and the gentle oil-scent of Maggie’s skin. They breathed deep.

“Wanna fuck ‘em?” Maggie asked.

Face smushed, their voice both muffled and shaking with frustration, they said, “Fine. As long as you know I really had to lower my standards for this.”

“Y’okay.”

The frustration-shaking impeded their ability to free themself from their pants. By the time they managed to slap their cock against her chest and grab each tit like they were folding over a blob of dough, they were practically vibrating. The first thrust into the space between those globes of flesh nearly made them come all on its own. Her skin was icy, cooling in the winter air, gooseflesh rising on it in a texture Pocket had never fucked before. They rocked desperately between the tight gap. Maggie smirked no matter how hard they squeezed.

“Bet you wanna come on my face, don’t you?” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m used to this sort of attention.”

That only made Pocket feel worse. Not only were they falling for this, but everyone else on the planet was too.

They came right as the tip of their cock crested cleavage — just the tip, so completely engulfed was their size in comparison to Maggie’s. They couldn’t even get satisfaction from that. Being splattered in cum only fed into her ego.

She licked a drop at the corner of her mouth, then used Pocket’s scarf to clean up the rest before they could slink away.

They returned to the party cold and corrupted.

Maggie followed later, buttoning up her shirt and whistling, feeling appropriately belauded. She was just about to return to her seat, pick up that beer she’d been courting, maybe see if the gorgon at the dartboard had managed to hit a single shot yet, when Holliday wobbled up to her.

She had just come from the bathroom, looking both a little green around the gills and like someone had pissed in her cereal. She pointed one accusing finger in Maggie’s direction and said, “You. You got all the moral fiber of a sponge cake.”

Several whiskey malts into the celebrations, and Kelvin wrangles enough of his wherewithal to say, “You still haven’t told me about the first time you got covered in slime.”

“‘Scuse me?” Infernus asks.

“Covered in slime!” Kelvin repeats, appalled he’s being made out to look like like the crazy one here. “During the Ritual, you said ‘this is not the first time this’s happened’, and that last time you had to fall off a roof to ‘get it this bad’. When I said that certainly sounded like there was a story behind it, you told me if we survived you’d tell me all about it.” Kelvin testifies, at whiskey aided volume, “And I did try very hard to make sure we survived all that.”

“Heh,” Infernus snickers. “Nothin’ gets by you, brother. Got a mind like a steel trap.”

Despite the cloud of inebriation and the barrier of jubilant camaraderie that should blunt the impact, Kelvin winces.

The toothpick twitches downward with Infernus’ frown. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”

“No trouble,” Kelvin says. “I merely wish I… well that’s the trouble. I wished, instead of looking on my own.”

The Archmother may have given answers, but she did that and only that; Kelvin remembers no more of the expedition than he did before the Maelstrom. A blessing, perhaps, now knowing what sort of horrors the expedition entailed, but still. He’d rather face these horrors head on than have them haunting him, dogging him for the rest of his unlife.

However long that might be. Now that he knows the truth of the artifact — Ettrick, their experiments together, how it all came back upon their heads and the heads of everyone around them — he questions if such necromantic abuses can truly withstand the onslaught of time. Perhaps he and Ettrick — he and Seven, wherever he is now, off nursing his pride after his failed attempt at godhood — did not extend their natural lives much at all. The artifact may be losing its hold on Kelvin’s body even now. Perhaps he only bought himself a few more years, enough to stumble out of the arctic and share with the world what he’d seen.

Enough to make new friends, enough to try new things, he reminds himself. Enough to be surrounded by friendly faces in a warm bar, and indulge new triumphs. That is what life is, after all, whether it be true or borrowed. Either way, he is resolute to make the most of it. Even without memories, he can provide answers to the families of his crewmates; the closure that has been denied to them for so long.

There is much to do, but much to be grateful for. Tonight, he celebrates.

“Tell me the story, my friend,” Kelvin insists.

“Well,” Infernus leans back, both hands on the bar, musing in practiced amiability, “didn’t so much as fall off a roof as fall through it. Molly kept skylights on all her warehouses. She was ritzy like that.”

“Molly?”

“You don’t remember Molenzo? Huh, I guess she was more of a local uh… whatever the opposite of hero would be. Local bastard. Anyway, she had a big section of Harlem under her thumb, was pushing East, Mendoza wanted her to stay on her own turf. I came along to show off, look dangerous while the guys in front threw the real threats at each other. It was the preliminaries you know. No one was supposed to die.” Infernus drags a finger through a ring of leftover moisture. His eyes are far off.

“That seems…” Kelvin thinks. “Honorable. For a turf war.”

“Wasn’t no one supposed to die yet,” Infernus clarifies. “That comes later. There’s an order to these things, even if Molenzo wants to pull she’s gotta at least look like she took a hit first so it doesn’t come off like she caves under pressure. Except when we get there… seems like no one’s home. I’m new blood, so I’m the one who gets voted up on the roof, try to see if there’s some sort of trap waiting inside. So I scramble up, stick my head in, but instead of a trap, there’s this… Goo.”

“Goo,” Kelvin says.

“Viscous’ long lost cousin.” Infernus raises a hand in oath. “Least, that’s what I’m thinkin’ now that I’ve met some deep denizens. At the time, I’m looking at this big blue pool and I’m thinking horses not zebras. Just a swimming pool, you know? Some big, blue swimming pool Molly had installed because she’s a freak.

“Didn’t know it then, but Molenzo had been hearing about the regenerative properties of deep-sea slime, had gotten real particular about it, convinced herself if she could dunk her whole crew in one by one it’d make her an army of super-goons.”

“Dipping them in the River Styx by their ankles,” Kelvin hums.

“Uh, sure. Put the whole river into ‘em. Anyway, Molly was a few cards short of a full deck, and having her at the head of a souped-up army woulda been real bad news for Mendoza. He was lucky sea slime doesn’t actually work like that. Mostly Molenzo’d broken a hundred international laws, pissed off some sentient sea critters, and paid a small fortune, all to smuggle in this goop that was really only good for patching up bullet holes. Useful, but not the way she was thinking. She left plenty of guys, but to guard it, not the building, so they were all grouped in one place.”

“I take it your faction found that out the hard way?”’

“Yep,” Infernus pops. “I’m leaning over, looking at the pool, they get impatient and start clearing the bottom floor. All the sudden, whole building shakes, and I go-”

Vvvpp! emits from between Infernus’ teeth as he uses a shotglass to mime a young Ixian falling through a skylight.

“Splash,” he says. “Right into the drink. And you’ve felt the stuff, way thicker than water, couldn’t swim to the surface. Only saving grace is you can breathe it, but by the time I hauled my ass out — after figuring out how to not keep sinking deeper — fight was already over. All my buddies were either dead or smart enough to beat it, and here I come in, sopping wet, standing shivering in the middle of a bunch of Maulers. They look at me, all pathetic, head to toe in blue slime and can’t start a spark to save my life, and you know what they do?”

“What?”

“Start laughing,” Infernus grimaces, though it mellows when Kelvin provides the expected bark of amusement.

“I certainly would have a hearty chuckle if I saw something so absurd as a blue Infernus,” Kelvin plays.

“It was about as stupid as you can get,” Infernus confirms. “Everyone yucks it up, I gotta stand there and take it. They say ‘go home, kid’, and let me walk out with my life, even if I don’t got my dignity.”

“Oh,” Kelvin blinks. “How old were you during this?”

“Uh… fourteen? Maybe fifteen, can’t really remember.”

“So young and already so put upon,” Kelvin says. “Infernus, truly no one in New York has lived as interesting a life as you.”

“I can think of a few. Ones who didn’t get out of the game as early as me.”

“But yet every adventure you share is that of legends! Have you ever considered writing them down?”

“Convincing me to start a diary?” Infernus jokes, passing Kelvin another malt and taking away his empty. “No need. All up here.” He taps the fedora’s brim.

“I meant for others to read.”

Infernus, after all, is quite a popular draw. If this were a normal night, everyone would be flocking to the bartender, which would make it rather rude to arrest his time so completely the way Kelvin is doing. But tonight is not a normal night. There are no paying customers in Jezebel’s, only the victorious, the triumphant leaning on tables and swinging from chandeliers. (That last one was almost literal, with Vyper promptly squandering the benefit of the doubt afforded her the instant her ban was lifted, and needing to be chased out.) Hank’s been serving too, though now even he’s succumbed to shooting the shit, lounging with an elbow on Geist’s table while she bandies something in his direction. A smile plays at her lips while she sips her wine. His make no such attempts at humility. Across from the bantering pair, the pool tables are filled with Ritualists: Mo and Kill sweeping the others for all they’re worth, offering no mercy to the first timers; Victor stands by, humorless, as unfazed always; Paige has only nominally allowed herself to be included in the celebrations, and has gleefully buried herself in phonebooks with hopeful gusto; Haze has made progress in her drink at a rate of approximately one ice cube per hour.

Yes, tonight Kelvin has Infernus quite to himself.

“Maybe folks would read ‘em if you were tellin’ ‘em,” Infernus deflects airily. “I ain’t a writer.”

“You’re an incredible storyteller, which is more than many writers can say.”

This, too, Infernus looks like he’s about to dismiss. But before he can, a ripple of genuine appreciation catches him, the kind his relaxed persona doesn’t usually let shine through. The moment is brief. He takes a great and sudden interest in Kelvin’s drink, which alone is enough to sate Kelvin’s self-satisfaction. It’s maybe the first time he’s seen something more than smooth cordiality from the bartender.

“Still can’t,” he does eventually admit with a shake of his head. “Pretty sure statute of limitations isn’t out on the most interesting ones.”

“Ah,” Kelvin understands.

“Got people and names I still wanna keep protected, you know.”

They flee from the fight with their lives, but not much else, intact.

Infernus fades in and out of consciousness. If it weren’t for the scrape of crampons, he could almost believe he’s floating on clouds, the city splayed below him in a rhythmic, dreamlike way as Kelvin’s feet slide across the ice. Though, despite their distance from streetlevel, they never rise above the tops of the highrises, balancing the speed of their escape with the cover darting between buildings provides.

Something hunts them.

His cheek presses into the coat, downy, still cloudlike, and occasionally forgets to be terrified as lucidity comes and goes. His leg is broken. Something seeps through his body, dense and ichorous, and when he tries to close his fist it only sporadically agrees. His eyes cast upward to catch a glimpse of either Kelvin’s face or an indication of how deep of a mess they’re in. The former betrays the later. A line of blood runs from sliced cheek into white-touched beard. Seven, behind them, is gaining ground rather than losing it, despite evasive maneuvers. The man in his arms hampers Kelvin’s pace, while their pursuer has no such problems. He only needs his kill.

Kelvin’s stronger than you’d think, for his size. Though, that misjudgment could only be made before you noticed the half-ton shard of bone he keeps strapped to his back with no apparent detriment to his mobility. He is resilient, he is near-immortal, but he will not abandon his charge, which means Infernus is about to drag another friend down with him. Distantly, he’s jostled by a resolve that belongs to a more coherent version of himself, one who thinks about more than how soft Kelvin is or the needles that seem to have replaced the blood in his veins. They could make some sort of last stand, turn and face death instead of letting it close the distance they’ll never make to base. Surely he’s got one more fireball in him, one more facet of his being that wants to go down swinging.

However, the opportunity to go out in a blaze refuses him, firstly because thought is no longer moving at the speed of thought. A large chunk of time passes from when the idea of fighting formulates and when there is actual impetus to open a mouth, to flex a hand. His slowness is a blessing though; for then his last desperate attempt doesn’t end up interfering with Kelvin’s last desperate attempt.

With the footsteps on the ice behind them closing, Kelvin turns on a heel. Infernus can’t see it, face buried in parka, but he knows Kelvin does something with his pellet launcher by the distinctive thunk thunk of its windup. That’s the only warning, that sound, and then the pressure change falls on them hard.

An entire blizzard's worth of pressure. A bubble of ice so pristine it looks like blown glass, encasing them in a force-field distorted by the ground and the Florist’s they’ve shied too close to. The return path is guillotine-sliced. The sounds of the city cease. Seven comes careening to a stop, throwing up a wave of snow from his shoes, and Infernus pictures a wonderful alternate reality where Kelvin timed it just a little later to cut the sick bastard in half. Instead, that is how the chase ends: Seven, just outside, Kelvin and Infernus within, the wight’s knees suddenly giving out. In relief, or because he’s simply reached his limit, the same limit that forced him to resort to the dome in the first place. He only barely manages to keep from dropping Infernus as he collapses, panting.

Vision swimming, Infernus cranes to get a better view of their pursuer, but Kelvin’s arms tighten when he does, afraid the movement is his own failing grip.

Seven pauses, contemplating, though it’s difficult to tell if his nonchalance is feigned or if he’s enraged at all at being denied his satisfaction. The veil, as always, only displays the incongruous, and perpetual, Jack-o-lantern’s grin.

He extends a finger, scraping it against the foot-thick curve of ice, chuckling, “A coward ‘til then end, Kelvin. How very predictable.”

“Cowardice?” Kelvin asks. “When you abandon the fight to hunt down a man hardly a threat to you? Execute him in cold blood?”

Infernus can hear the glare in his voice, feel him subtly shifting Infernus away from the danger. His leg protests.

“That’s called strategy, Kelvin,” Seven says, “something you’ve never fully grasped.”

The fingers drags down, a long, ragged claw leaving a ghoulish half-smile to grin at the pair shivering within. The cold sets in. Infernus already felt like a side of tenderized beef before it came down, but now it drains him until his hands shake, the idea summoning any fire at all a faint dream. Penned in, they watch as Seven paces, slowly elongating his gash in the ice until it becomes a cane-shape.

“How long do you think you can hold that?” Seven muses.

“Longer than your patience,” Kelvin says. “You seem a man all too feverish for his ambitions.”

“Seem?” Seven seethes, the pacing coming to a chilling stop. “You’re half a man Kelvin, still grubbing for an empty spot in your mind that’s not worth filling. I don’t waste my time because my patience is infinite. I know I’ll get to kill you. As unavoidably as a meteor crashing to earth.”

His hand leaves the ice, lingering for a moment, before withdrawing with its master. Seven makes to dissapear back into the city. He glides on unhurried steps, the last of their escape path blowing away as crystal dust under his feet.

When he is gone, Kelvin’s shoulders sag. “I have no doubt he is not far, waiting for us to make a break for it. I think we will be here some time.”

“How long will it hold?” Infernus’s voice is gravel and sour milk. It’s been hours since he’s used it.

“A while,” Kelvin says, “but it will weaken, eventually.” He shifts Infernus off knees, onto ground. “So, let's work on keeping you alive until help arrives, yes?”

“You think anyone’s coming?”

“Others survived. They will search for us.” Quieter, he adds, “They always do.”

“Must be nice to be certain you’ll be missed.”

“Infernus! Don’t say such a thing. I happen to know a great many people would be distraught if anything were to happen to their favorite gin-slinger. Which is why you should show me that bite.”

Infernus grimaces. It appears he can’t put it off any longer.

Irrationality reigns, for he feels if he peels away the shirt, exposes the bite to air, it will be emboldened, throbbing with new life. As long as the seal of dried blood holds to him, no fresh agony will come, or so he’s convinced himself.

Unwanted vindication is his when the hem is actually lifted, and the crust breaks on the wound. The venom’s ice sinks deeper, elbowing around, and a shameful murmur of pain forces its way out of his throat so the toxin can muscle into its place. Exposed, two massive lagoons of green reflection prick his skin, just above his hip. Within his veins, the venom spreads, turning black into an even darker, verdant green. Physocarpus growing under his skin.

The punctures wink evilly in the Maelstrom’s twilight, like emerald eyes.

“Ógeðsleg stelpa,” Kelvin shakes his head with distaste.

Infernus whimpers again when Kelvin’s canteen baptizes the wound, getting away the worst of the gore. The water fizzles, and not just from Infernus himself; the serum contains something vile.

“Pressure,” Kelvin warns. “A compress may draw some of the poison out.”

The cloth kisses Infernus’ skin, the hand holding it gloveless and bare, and Infernus’ mind swims with so much pain it takes him several seconds to even notice the danger.

“Wait,” he says, but can’t shout, because his voice is still betraying him.

Kelvin freezes, eyes locking to Infernus’, filled with concern. With concern, but not pain.

Infernus’ warning has come too late — Kelvin’s skin is already touching him — but Kelvin isn’t burning, isn’t jerking away from him in surprise. His knuckles brush Infernus’ ribs, and Infernus has not hurt him.

“You’re… alright,” Infernus says.

“I am.” Kelvin raises his eyebrows. “You are not. Hence the compress.”

“Usually I gotta worry about. You know. Turning any humans I touch into barbecue.”

Kelvin’s bemusement softens. “Ah.”

A hand, full palm, comes to rest on Infernus’ side, steadying as the wet cloth wicks away more detritus. It is the most contact Infernus has had in a very long time. The unnatural coldness of Kelvin’s skin should be disquieting, but it doesn’t evoke the chill of death or the stagnation of the far-away Arctic. Instead, it calls to mind a half-dozen memories mashed together. An old tramp lingering in Jezebel's doorway as he puffs feeling back into his hands. The outside of a whiskey glass, sweating from the cubes within.

“My burden has its uses.” Kelvin tilts his head to the artifact on his back. Stone, bone, what have you. The only thing certain is the unprecedented power of its aura. “It keeps me exactly as cold as I need to be in order to remain eh… fresh. It appears we balance each other out.”

The smile he grants Infernus is warm and uncomplicated, unknotting something in Infernus’s chest even the open palm hadn’t managed. He’d like to let his concerns go, fully hand himself over to that smile, but the physics still trouble him. He’s borderline molten, Kelvin’s a walking cold-snap; maybe Infernus is the one that will break if their magics stop repelling each other for even one instant. He imagines cold water filling a white-hot glass, freezing it so fast it shatters.

But the artifact continues to hold. Kelvin’s body is against his. Normalized.

“That rock’s really something,” Infernus says.

“Most certainly. Though,” Kelvin says, “I can stand to be a little ways from it, I think. Let me get you something more comfortable to lay down on.”

It takes watching Kelvin unstrap from the runestone to realize he means the coat. Infernus watches, but doesn’t warn him against it, even though he worries Kelvin will stiffen, and suddenly becomes a true corpse once again. But Kelvin’s judgement is founded. The runestone has enough slack to let him remove his coat and make a pile of his supplies. 

While Infernus waits, he looks at where they’ve landed themselves; the dome has half-consuming the building, digesting what it can of brickwork and leaving a wall that may collapse after the melt. Infernus would worry for whoever’s inside, but from what he’s seen of the Ritual so far, it seems everybody smart took the warning to stay home. Probably the only thing a shoddy wall is threatening is the two of them. It’s certainly a forlorn section of the district, street ill-used and lined with trash. When Kelvin returns and lays his parka for Infernus to lie on, he’s grateful to be separated from the grime.

“Now,” Kelvin says, rolling up Infernus’ pant leg, “let's take a look at that break, shall we?”

Despite the limited supplies, Kelvin’s first aid knowledge hasn’t been diminished with the rest of his memories. There are certainly worse people to be trapped with.

When the splint is set, Kelvin opens one of his grenades by cracking it on an elevated portion of sidewalk.

“Whoa! Kelvin! Aren’t those bombs?”

“Well, yes,” Kelvin says, setting a shattered rim aside. “But the primer is a standard magical base, combined with other reagents. It still has its healing properties.”

“Weird. And uh, concerning.”

“Science, my friend! Everything has many uses.”

“Still.” Infernus tries to distance himself, but his leg gives him no leeway. “Open explosives and I don’t really mix. Maybe keep ‘em a few extra feet from Mister Hot ‘n’ Bothered?”

“Ha! Hot and bothered? I’ve never known a man more buttoned up in my life,” Kelvin says. 

The irony is heavy. As he says it, focus down, his hands are removing Infernus’ shirt in preparation for another examination. The joke combined with the motion muddle into a surprisingly intimate cocktail.

Infernus swallows. There’s a new tightness in his throat that has nothing to do with his disused voice or swelling brought on by venom, and everything to do with being teased while he’s shirtless. Not something he’s ever been shy about before. Being half-dying himself has left him vulnerable.

Vest and shirt are both ruined, but Kelvin folds them neatly anyway. A seed of gratitude buds inside Infernus’ ribcage. 

Under his parka, Kelvin’s been wearing another layer of clothing he doesn’t need. Grey cotton covers both his chest and the arm that temporarily supports Infernus to a sitting position, holding him practically against Kelvin’s chest as he readies the tonic. When it drips on, it feels like the frost is finding new, worse pathways within him. The only silver lining is that it chases out the other substance, so he does his best not to fight it, distracting himself with other sensations. Kelvin’s shirt. It’s not as fluffy as the coat, but comfortable. He’s close enough he could hear Kelvin’s heartbeat, if there was one to hear.

Leaned against Kelvin’s breastbone, the healing making him hazy, he notes, “When we were getting the hell out of there, I kept thinking how soft you were. Like lying on a cloud.”

“…Oh?” Kelvin asks.

“Yeah.”

The tonic’s been applied. There’s no reason for Kelvin to let him keep resting here, that which was only a moment’s convenient position. He thinks, now is when Kelvin pushes him off, sets him back on the coat with the hard asphalt beneath, and resents it. 

It doesn’t happen. Kelvin allows him to stay, holding him almost tenderly.

“...Thanks,” he says, embarrassed at how relieved he is. Embarrassed, too, about how easy he was to read.

“Of course,” Kelvin says. “But back to your supernatural heat: I’m curious. May I?”

Infernus has to tilt his head a bit to see what he’s up to. A hand is lingering over his hat. When he nods his assent, Kelvin whisks the fedora away.

“Fascinating,” Kelvin says, as the flames lick his hand.

“Huh,” Infernus says, just as surprised. 

All of this is unprecedented. He’s sitting here, not hurting a buddy of his, and some instinctual part of him tilts his head in invitation, welcoming Kelvin’s touch. If he knew more Ixians, this wouldn’t be novel, but he’s spent more than half his life among human clientele, and running with human gangs before that. It’s hard for him to imagine folks doing this all the time, casually, among friends.

When fingers touch his crown, he melts, letting the pain be dulled by a single good sensation, softly voicing encouragement as they gently massage his scalp.

Kelvin makes another hum of inquiry, this time indicating Infernus’ forearms. The glyphs there are different from the runes on Kelvin’s stone, though similar in purpose, regulating their bearers. The hand that touches his glyphs are cool, but not unpleasant, and Infernus lets forth a whole-body shiver. Between that and having his head rubbed, he swears he might just start to purr.

The glyphs ripple orange-red, but don’t hurt Kelvin either. He hums a noise that is nonvocally equivalent to Fascinating.

“The Shelter doesn’t seem to have as bad an effect on you as I worried,” Kelvin observes. “Have courage! Certainly not the worst scrape I’ve been in. Once, Edrick and I fell into a hole. We were in there for four days.”

“Fell in a hole? Didn’t that happen to Yuri Bancroft too?” Infernus asks. “Do all you explorers have crazy bad luck or do ice caverns just start stalking you when you become an adventurer?”

“Not an ice cavern,” Kelvin says. “This was in south Ixia, foliage on the forest floor covering a ravine.”

He clears his throat, cutting the story to silence.

“You know,” Infernus advises, “‘Ixia’ itself isn’t a sensitive topic, Kelv.”

“I understand that,” Kelvin says. “I am merely trying not to put my foot in my mouth again.”

“Fair. You got a habit of that.”

A blush touches the tip of Kelvin’s nose, impressively fighting against the ice in his skin. He turns his head, but Infernus reaches out a hand, patting Kelvin’s in assurance.

“Relax, you don’t bother me none.” Although he’d only meant it as a brief aside, his hand doesn’t depart after. His thumb winds under Kelvin's palm. “Tell me ‘bout this hole you fell in.”

“Ah,” Kelvin says, rousing a little, glad to be distracted. “It was during the monsoon season, where there were barely any days to make distance. Sightlines, you see. So we took what we could, making the most of a good day, going long past when we should have made camp. Of course, as soon as we fell, we were punished with days of straight rainfall, flooding the bottom of the cavern. Edrick had broken his arm on the way down, and he was a terror about the whole thing.”

Infernus, drowsily, lets his head fall sideways, resting against Kelvin’s chest. “I could whine a bit more, if it’ll make you nostalgic.”

Kelvin snorts, but backtracks, “No, no he never whined. But he was a brute, then and always. Said whatever came to his mind when he was angry. And he was angry at me quite a lot in those days.”

“‘Those days’ meaning time in the hole?”

Kelvin grunts neither confirming nor denying, continuing to stroke Infernus’ hair. “The rescue party went out when the weather was clear. We were at each other's throats by then. I did the best I could for his injuries, but I worried he was genuinely going to kill me.” He caps this off with a chuckle Infernus finds gauche.

“Sounds like an ass.”

“Eh, any two people will wear on each after four days in isolation.”

“And how many days did it take for him to start laying into you?”

This time, Kelvin admits it with a sigh, “Long, long before any of it.”

Infernus shivers in the cold. The dome is getting to him.

“Ah, I’m sorry Infernus,” Kelvin says. He’s already adjusting, pulling out the parka to wrap it over them both. “Getting caught up in stories when I have a companion in need.” 

Kelvin always says Infernus’ full name. Which isn’t too strange, most people do, those that call him ‘Fern numbering in the single digits. Yet from Kelvin’s mouth, it feels closer than even those, feels the way the parka wrapped warmly around them does. It should go without saying, but Infernus is not used to the cold, has never had his body fail to provide the heat it needed. The effect of the coat surprises him, seems entirely disproportionate for a single piece of clothing to make. He relaxes into the share of body heat, now only troubled by the wounded side he has to keep off.

He feels Kelvin relax too. Feels it in his whole body, the massive sigh escaping out underneath him. He chuckles.

“Do you ever need to breathe?” he asks.

Kelvin stops. Simply stops breathing at the censure. “Ah, no,” he says. “But sometimes I forget that.”

“Mm. Heard you say you think you’re revenant, not a wight?”

“Do I not seem particularly vengeful to you?”

“Honestly?” Infernus asks. “After meeting Vindicta, I don’t think I’m going to run into a more revenant-y revenant in my goddamn life. ‘Dicta’s got a thought-out plan to murder half the bigots in New York, while here you are, playing field medic and acting the big mama bear. You’re missing the…”

“Bloodlust?” Kelvin supplies.

“Not a drop.”

Kelvin lifts his chin, fixating on the eclipse through the ripple of the ice. Melt has begun to pool on the inside. Help still hasn’t come.

“A thirst for knowledge is not as romantic a reason to return?” Kelvin eventually asks. “Don’t answer, I’m only joking. I know it does not quite fit, but it is so difficult to make sense of my own existence without the context my mind keeps denying me. Our friend Vindicta has something I lack: she knows why she died, and that she was wronged.”

“Not you?” Infernus asks.

“I am not so sure. Edrick always said I had an ego. He even accused me of it right before I left, said I couldn’t imagine what an eighth astral gate would involve. Did I have enough of one that what happened to me, what happened to the team that trusted me, cannot be blamed on outside forces?”

Infernus doesn’t have an answer. He squeezes Kelvin’s hand, still indulging in the novelty of bare skin against him.

“That the time Geist was talking about?” Infernus asks. “At that fundraiser?”

“Yes. He berated me quite viciously. Broke my jaw. The expedition had to be delayed another year while I recovered.”

“He what?” Infernus lifts his head, even though the sudden motion makes him dizzy. “Way you always talk about this guy, I thought he was your friend. And he was beating the shit out of you in public?”

Kelvin won’t look at him. In fact, he even gets up, under pretense of grabbing another grenade. Infernus wraps the coat around himself when he goes, staring at Kelvin’s back and the blue that the runestone casts across it, even at a distance.

The stretching silence disquiets him. Being pushy… it doesn’t come naturally to him, even though he’s just as curious as everyone else. He reminds himself: even though he’s in uniform, he’s not Kelvin’s bartender right now, doesn’t have to be perfectly toeing the line between friendly and respectful. Especially when his concern is almost overwhelming.

“Kelv,” he says, propped against the wall, not taking his eyes off the other man. “Kelvin,” again when Kelvin refuses. “That shit’s not normal, man.”

“Please Infernus. I am an adult. I can handle a few bruises and a disagreement with a friend.” Kelvin approaches before Infernus can rebuke him, pressing a fresh mixture to the wound. “There. That should last for another half hour.”

“Why’d you keep talking about him like he’s the greatest thing that ever happened?”

“I have led a venturesome life. Edrick hardly counts among its greatest dangers.”

Infernus is a different kind of hot and bothered now. “What’s wrong with you? This guy was going to murder you in some cave and you’re going to look for him?”

“You’d understand if you-” He cuts himself off.

“What? ‘Hell do I gotta understand, Kelvin?”

“-Understand if you’ve ever loved somebody.” His head jerks unnaturally on the last words, as though trying to prevent them from coming out of his mouth.

Infernus is struck silent.

Kelvin’s motions have become stiff, mechanical, the escaped confession already regretted. Something crackles deep in the building behind him. The melt on the shelter’s inner walls comes down in drips.

Kelvin’s face is schooled so carefully, yet somehow this makes sadness around his eyes all the more plain. He looks at the wound, but not Infernus. “I suppose that changes your opinion of me, doesn’t it?”

Infernus gains control of his emotions. Says, “Something like that’s none of my business,” and instantly feels the door close between them. The bartender returning. The proverbial — literal — man, buttoning back up.

Kelvin takes the indignity stoically. His shoulders do not bunch, but much like the failure of his composure, his nonchalance highlights that Infernus’ response has left him shamefaced.

This doesn’t kept him from performing his self-set task well and methodically, the duty he had picked up not because it was his job but because Infernus was his comrade and it needed to be done. Now his movements are restrained, intentionally touching Infernus as little as possible. All those little contacts don’t seem so innocent now, though that thought guilts Infernus the moment he has it. He’s thinking the worst of someone who’s basically been saving his sorry ass nonstop for an hour now. It’s not right to make Kelvin out to be some sort of…opportunist. Especially with how much Infernus indulged it.

The fresh compress disappears, Kelvin rising and taking the comfort of his presence with him. Infernus knows he won’t sit back down next to him. He busies himself with the packs on the other side of the shelter, failing to drown out the ominous groaning from the building’s failing wall, playing at any normalcy.

“We’ll certainly have a few boons waiting for us when we return,” he says, the cheer false. “Plans to spend them on anything in particular?”

Changing the subject. The only way out of this really. Infernus doesn’t begrudge him for it, but he still can’t reply, can’t move on yet. His mouth is open, forming on something that will fix this, when the brickwork beside Kelvin that’s been complaining for minutes now shifts ominously. Then, it bursts inward, showering the bubble with dust.

“Gentlemen,” Seven says.

The distance is wrong. Too far away to do anything, yet close enough to see Kelvin’s eye widen a fraction of a second before Seven grabs him by the hair and slams his head against the ice.

“No!” Infernus screams, yanks himself toward them, but his leg won’t allow it. If he could move, he would have when he’d needed to flee for his life, instead of collapsing in a back alley until Kelvin had risked his own to charge through the fight and save him.

The slam leaves Kelvin stunned. Seven doesn’t care. He chases it with a thousand-volt jolt, sending Kelvin spasming, first aid supplies falling from his twitching hands. Before he’s even stopped convulsing, Seven slams his face into the wall again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

There’s a red spot forming along the blue ice, spiderwebbed with cracking white.

Infernus sends flames from his fingers, but it only leaves a black scorch on the wall, three feet above Seven’s head. Even that nearly sends him into unconsciousness. The venom and the dome have sapped everything from him, reducing to a shivering mass that can only watch as his companion is brutalized. For entertainment. The gap from which Seven had entered gapes like an open wound, framing it all in perfect blackness.

Seven’s dedicated to enlarging the red spot. His new purpose in life. Gore and the remains of Kelvin’s face splatter his prisoner’s uniform, and he takes a certain pleasure in gripping Kelvin’s entire weight by his hair, takes pleasure in the motion of his arm as he beats him against the wall. He only ever stops to deliver another shock, cackling as the wight’s hands claw helplessly for a gun that is far, far out of reach, discarded in the pile of his supplies. The smell of frying flesh permeates the air.

Slam. Slam. Slam. Slam. Infernus loses count. Sadistic zaps punctuate each blow, and they don’t stop until Seven lets go, letting Kelvin’s remains fall to the floor. One side of his face is nothing but blood and bone, a lone, cerulean eye staring lidlessly out of a mass of red. The spot on the wall is the size of a serving tray. There’s a tooth embedded in it.

Seven crouches next to the corpse. “Still with us, Kelvin?”

The eyeball twitches.

“Good,” Seven says. He ruffles Kelvin’s hair. “We’ll save you for last. You can enjoy the show in the meantime.”

He turns. When he stalks toward Infernus, Infernus jettisons flame directly into his chest.

It does nothing. The Patron’s gifts have swollen within Seven like a tumor, looming, his new gifts far outstripping any of Infernus’ talents. He closes the distance and strikes Infernus in the temple with the butt of his rifle.

Infernus gasps with the pain, and that intake of breath is his last free one. Seven climbs on top of him, crushing his chest, gripping his face with one hand to bring it closer to his own.

“I know you,” he observes. “They spoke of you in the tunnels. You were something, once. Before you muzzled yourself.”

His fingers force their way inside Infernus’ mouth, turning his chin this way and that, a child observing a shiny beetle right before he smashes it. A new muzzle for him. Infernus bites. Seven sends a thousand volts straight through his soft palate.

The scream warps around current-proof gloves, echoing in the small chamber that has become prison rather than sanctuary. Against his will, his body kicks, back arching, sending new waves of agony through his leg as the splint threatens to split. Helplessly, he tries burning the monster off him. So close, directly above him, it should be easy.

Ironic. He was so worried about hurting Kelvin, but when he needs the flames most, he can’t call them anymore. 

Kelvin. For whose benefit this all is.

Tears kaleidoscope the corner of his eye, but even so, he still sees the movement when it happens.

Another zap, another strangled scream. “Ah,” Seven says. “The sound of progress.”

The hand withdraws from Infernus’ mouth. It infiltrates the coat keeping his modesty, locating the bitemark with ease. Only a few more seconds. Only a few more seconds that Infernus has to hold his attention.

Seven’s fingers ghost across — then land just below — the wound, resting their threat against his hip. “Let’s see what else can make you scream, eh?”

Kelvin, standing directly behind him with both arms raised, caves in Seven’s head with the rock.

The disk that makes up his head folds inwards, body following the swing. He falls to the side, off Infernus. There is one moment where it’s possible Seven might be alive, might lash out from his damaged state with the tendrils of power he seems to have endless amounts of. But that opportunity closes when Kelvin brings the runestone point-down a second time, and turns his head to paste.

Infernus gags. Kelvin, hands resting on top of his instrument of death, stands for one perilous moment. His knees quaver. Then, give way.

“Kelvin!” Infernus manages to call through every fried nerve-ending in his throat.

He drags himself toward the wight, trying to keep from succumbing to the same collapse. Kelvin’s managed to pull himself seated by the time Infernus reaches him, back against the dome’s wall.

The eye — the one on the side of the face that still has skin — focuses on Infernus. His throat moves, vowels coming up, but the words he’s desperate for Infernus to hear don’t escape from his shattered jaw.

“Hey, hey, I’m with you brother,” he promises, grabbing Kelvin’s good shoulder. “It’s alright, you got him. You got him.”

The grenades are all the way on the other side of the dome. A galaxy away. Infernus rolls to his side, panic threatening to overpower him, wondering how long the rock can be convinced to hold together a body that’s falling apart at the seams. He’s about to start his arduous crawl when Kelvin grips his forearm, a moaned warning forming deep in his chest.

“I gotta go get them, you’re falling to pieces,” Infernus says. Kelvin stirs, meaning to rise. “No. No, listen Kelv. You did this for me, I do this for you, that’s how it works, alright?”

Both eyes, maimed and not, stare. He can’t do more. A tear forms, cradles itself in the socket, then spills down his cheek. Infernus claps his shoulder before he goes.

The grenades, so hard fought for, are impossible to open. Infernus doesn’t have the strength to crack them, Kelvin sure doesn’t, and he’s left prying helplessly at their rims like they’re particularly feisty pickle jars.

“Fuck,” Infernus says, his shaky, current-damaged arms slipping loose on the lid for the dozenth time. “Fuck.” It drops to his side.

He rubs the heel of his palm against his eyes. They come away wet.

It’s hard to tell if Kelvin’s dying or not. He’s sustained injuries no non-undead could survive, but Infernus doesn’t know how close he’s butting up against the runestone’s limit. He’s certainly not getting better. The dome is punctured, any healing properties escaping out into greater New York. He’s slowing down, and Infernus’ is too broken to help.

“Fuck,” he repeats. He lifts his head.

Kelvin doesn’t move. He still sits, and stares, eyes pleading for something as wet continues to roll down his remaining cheek.

Infernus has never been good with the physical, the casual. Trained himself out of it young, recoiling every time he left someone he cared for with a fresh burn. Even now, the thought leaves him unsettled in his stomach, but dammit. Kelvin’s done right by him.

Dragging himself forward, he curls himself into Kelvin’s side, grabbing his hand pressing it to his chest.

“I got you,” he says. “I’m…I’m here. Hold on to me.”

A rumble, a maybe-laugh-maybe-sob, inspires one in Infernus too. He places his other hand over their grip and then — because he’s sorry, because he actually does want to — presses his forehead against Kelvin’s cheek.

What to do now, Infernus hasn’t the faintest. If the others haven’t found them by now, they’re probably dead; rounded up by Seven’s friends, or scattered and in just as bad of shape as the pair of them are. Geist is tough to kill, but also the least likely to search despite her supposed soft spot for him. ‘Affectionate’ from Geist just means she’ll feel bad when she discards you. Mo and Krill would notice Infernus’ absence, but last he saw them, Mo had a knife between his ribs and the pair were burrowing to safety. He can hope they’re better off, but they might just as well be hunkering down waiting for their own rescue. Though, Kelvin’s their team’s only medic. They might have to wait hours. The toughest are out of the picture, but Vindicta could scout the skies, locating the conspicuous dome dominating a good portion of the street… He ticks them off one by one in his mind, each one an imperfect option, a faint hope. Friends and teammates, vividly imagined, so distinct he swears he can see them moving just beyond the shelter’s now dirtied walls.

Because there is someone there. Right outside. Their muddied forms move like shadows on the cave wall, and Infernus tenses, remembering how Seven tracked them, remembering that no amount of wishful thinking can guarantee it’s friendlies that have found them.

Kelvin hears them too, tensing beside him.

Seven had breached their defenses. Someone’s breaching their defenses now, burrowing through the hole Seven made, dislodging bricks until they happen upon the victims inside.

It’s Victor who pushes out into the watery twilight, blinking.

“Vic.” Infernus slumps against the wall in relief.

“‘Fern?” Noticing Kelvin’s state, Victor rushes over. “Shit, is he dead?”

“Much as he ever was.”

Kelvin flexes his hand to indicate his relative animation. Then, shakily, forms it into an O.K. symbol.

“Don’t listen to that,” Infernus says. “He needs to get out of here. Now.”

But Kelvin is shaking his head, which must be excruciating. His hand is on Infernus’ back weakly pushing him forward as he implores Victor with his half-ruptured eyes.

“Oh hell no,” Infernus tells Kelvin. “Hell no, no goddamn way he’s taking me out of here before you.” Frustration and fear bite each other’s tails, Kelvin finding new ways to exasperate him.

“Guys, guys calm down,” Victor says. “Vin’s outside, she can signal the others.” He grips both of their shoulders. “We’re not leaving anyone behind.”

“Cute,” Infernus snorts the next time he swings by Kelvin’s place.

Kelvin’s horrid posture vanishes, becoming ramrod straight in the open doorway. It takes an extra second of Infernus jutting his chin in Kelvin’s direction to take his meaning; he’s indicating Kelvin’s half-moon spectacles, resting precariously at the end of his nose.

“Ah, right, yes,” Kelvin says, self-consciously letting them fall to their chain. “My eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Being preserved exactly how I died would have been much more tolerable if it’d happened a decade or two sooner.”

Though, the artifact’s limits certainly aren’t as bad as initially thought. He’s been experimenting with how far he can get; it’s gracious enough that he can actually change his clothes and set the parka aside for awhile. Even without sweat and other bodily grimes, the coat had been starting to accumulate an odor, and he’s glad to be rid of it. Now he can return to his preferred attire: today is his favorite green turtleneck, and the corduroys he’s so missed. It doesn’t seem like it would be much, yet greeting a guest while not still clad in the trappings of his greatest failure has lightened a load he didn’t know he was holding.

“That,” Infernus drops into his usual seat, “is the closest you've ever come to being anything less than optimistic about your whole ice wight thing.”

“There’s no way to change it now,” Kelvin shrugs. “Any chance of that disappeared the moment I spent my wish on answers, instead of myself.”

“Hey, in another fifty years, you’ll have another shot, assuming spikeman wants to take a crack at our plane.”

“I think they were antlers.”

“Eh.”

“And that’s if the artifact lasts that long,” Kelvin adds, but immediately waves the words away. He’s already been called out once for his flagging optimism, best not to make Infernus any more concerned. “No matter, this is my new normal. I can only try to keep myself busy enough I do not think about such things.”

“Real busy,” Infernus hums knowingly. “That’s why you haven’t been able to get to that.” He nods to a certain Tunnel Rat’s memoir open on Kelvin’s coffee table, three months untouched.

A groan accompanies Kelvin’s two-fingered massage to the bridge of his nose. “...Yes. Let’s say that’s why.”

“Any reason you can’t just ‘lose’ it? Plenty ‘a junk in here, no one would be surprised.”

“Excuse you!” Kelvin balks. “None of this is ‘junk’. These are relics, Infernus.”

Everywhere there isn’t writing — his own or the sleek, bound editions of others — there are mementos from expeditions past. Plant samples from Abyssinia, carefully pressed into journals. A vase full of Ixian flowers, brittle but bioluminescent long past their death. Volcanic rocks from home. The last of these come in many shapes and sizes, scattered along the highest shelving where they can contrast pleasantly against the white ceiling. The largest is a gift from his grand-niece, given because it looked ‘just like his face’. There’s a shelf dedicated just to his pipe case, and spiritual measuring devices too useful to put into storage whir from the windowsill to the hall. Discarded antlers from a ‘Chinese Moose’, though the Astral transplants that now roam Gansu have very little similarity to their Earth counterparts. Each item brings a little of the world beyond into Kelvin’s home.

“Besides,” Kelvin adds. “Krill’s timely intervention did save me from your very large mutual friend. I do think I owe him.”

“Technically, Mo saved you from that.”

“From what I understand, a favor to Maurice is a favor to Krill.”

“Your choice buddy,” Infernus relents pleasantly. “You keep readin’ that, and I get to keep reading this.”

He makes a show of sweeping the manuscript of Kings of Crime into his lap.

“Be my guest.” Kelvin rises, goes to fetch his smoking pipe. “I do hope they’re flattering.”

Though, he thinks privately, not too flattering. The longer he’d written, the more he found himself drifting into long descriptions of the main character’s prowess in battle, his clever tricks that kept him one step ahead of his fellow outlaws. Giving Infernus’ character the same detail he’d given himself might have left him coming across rather… sycophantic. There’d been several things he’d described about Infernus that, upon rereading, barreled into the egregiously detailed. All scrapped in the edit, of course. Routine trimming. Nothing he hasn’t done before. Even in his factual retellings, he’d always been sure to regard Ettrick in perfectly neutral terms; no one who picked up one of his journals would glean anything of his personal life he didn’t expressly put on the page. No one ever guessed anything that would put him or Ettrick in danger. He would likewise keep his current emotions under wraps.

Kelvin taps the tobacco into his pipe. Before he can search for his matches, a soft “Here,” calls him back to Infernus, who he hadn’t realized was watching. He is motioned downward. He obeys. An igneous ring finger slides easily into the chamber, fingerpad along the smooth rose-wood until it dips to the fill line, immediately igniting the tobacco like it’s gunpowder. Infernus’ control is so fine, the thumb that accidentally brushes along Kelvin’s cheekbone is merely warm, while its sibling draws smoke a few scant centimeters away.

“Thank you, Infernus,” Kelvin says, in strict control of his voice.

“Y’know, you can just call me ‘Fern,” Infernus says, turning back to his reading. “Most people do.”

“Ah, but why? Your full name is so melodic.” Kelvin groans internally. So much for not being obvious. “I mean, of course, if you wish me to I will.”

“Nah, no big deal. Just… think you earned the right to, saving my ass out there so many times.”

“Right to? Ah, because the nickname is reserved for-” Kelvin really shouldn’t stumble over his words here. Really shouldn’t, but does. “-Those quite close to you?”

For a moment, there is only the sound of a turning page. Then, “Kinda different from your thing, I guess.” He glances up. “You want me to call you Kætill?”

“I…” It can only be the pipe making warmth bloom in Kelvin’s face, because it certainly can’t be Kelvin’s unbeating heart. “I don’t. Know.”

He kicks himself. It’s a simple yes or no question, and he tells Infernus he doesn’t know?

“No problem, just askin’,” Infernus, perceptive, amends. Expertly, he veers, “I’m named after a granddad I never met, so I really ain’t too attached to it. ‘Bout the only thing my folks kept of Ixia, so if they wanted me to be then…” Shrugs. “Shoulda talked about him more.”

“If that is the case, then I needn’t fear gaining your offense by traveling so far in my name changes,” Kelvin says, happy for the out. “You saw, yes?”

“From ‘Inferno’ to ‘Dante’?” Infernus asks. “Yeah, saw. Nice ring to it.”

“And he encounters only marginally less sinners than the original Dante!” Kelvin winks.

“Don’t follow,” Infernus frowns.

“Er… from Dante’s Inferno? The Divine Comedy?”

“I ain’t really religious.”

“Oh but it is a classic work of literature!” Kelvin says. “Is it not mandatory in school here?”

“Maybe,” Infernus shrugs. “Wouldn’t know. Had to drop my junior year.”

Ah. Oops. Yet another conversation with Infernus where Kelvin winds up making himself into a giant boob.

“I’m very sorry Infernus. I had no idea.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Infernus shrugs. “Long time ago. Was bound to happen though, with the sort of sheet I was wracking up. Big stuff, small stuff. You get predictable somewhere, anywhere, as soon as they got a description of you, there’s one place they know you can grab you.”

“‘They’ being rival gangs? Or the authorities?”

“Little ‘a column A, little ‘a column B.” Infernus’ eyes are on the page, but they no longer trace the lines. Eventually, he says, “I’ll be honest. Was some bad shit we were getting into. ‘We’, when Wraith and I were still running for Mendoza, before she split off on her own. That was when I was as good as her at not letting it get to me.”

“How bad?”

“Murder. Lotta murder.”

Kelvin isn’t surprised — as Infernus said, it isn’t something he didn’t already infer — but he has gotten used to Infernus talking about the past with a fond, perhaps even coy remembrance. True regret has been meticulously kept at arms length.

Kelvin lowers his pipe, places a hand over Infernus’. “My sympathies. That seems… a heavy burden.”

“Used to tell myself it was all a bunch of people who deserved it. But you know. It was also a bunch of people just like me.”

“People in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Kids,” Infernus says plainly. “It's always the kids, jockeying for status, trying to prove how bad they are. So you get used to fighting kids. And then time goes on, and you don’t notice time going on, and suddenly the guy you’re holding down is some fourteen-year-old and you realize how much bigger you are than him, how easy this is. And then it ain’t a kid any more, it’s just you, and some… little corpse with ash where his eyes used to be.”

Smoke and remorse hang thick over the sitting room, so tangible one could not move even if they wanted to.

It’s with a start that Infernus looks up, the eyes behind red panes more fearful than they ever were during the ritual. “Don’t-” he says, “don’t let that one make it in.”

“Of course Infernus,” Kelvin assures. “I wouldn’t even dream of it.”

A sliver of tension releases from Infernus’ shoulders. “Thanks. And uh, don’t worry ‘bout me. Even without all that, I probably woulda dropped out anyway. Wraith was one of those statistics geniuses, probably coulda gone all the way if they’d let her. But I was barely scraping by even before I started going wild-child.”

“That surprises me. You seem a very strong reader.”

“Huh?” Infernus blinks.

“You’ve nearly finished that,” Kelvin nods to the fascicle. “It would have taken me twice as long to reach the same point, and we’ve been stopping to chat in between.”

“Well, maybe I was alright at that,” Infernus admits. “But reading fast ain’t the same as being smart.”

“Infernus, you’re extremely intelligent,” Kelvin says. “Interpersonally, emotionally, chemically. I’ve seen you deescalate dozens of drunken altercations since the Ritual alone, gotten drunkards about to kill each other commiserating like the oldest of friends. You switch between speaking to the Lady Geist and Miss Silver on the fly as easily as any polyglot. You catalyze your own napalm!”

“Streetwise doesn’t get you through Algebra 201.”

“Perhaps not, but simply because an educational system doesn’t value-”

“And it doesn’t get you some damn literary references every one else knows,” Infernus says in unmissable aside.

Kelvin flinches. So Infernus had been embittered by that, despite his outward nonchalance. So quick to pretend everything slid off him, insults and compliments both. Maybe that’s a sign Kelvin shouldn’t push any further, but there’s really only one way to correct his mistake.

“Infernus,” he says, adjusting his grip, taking Infernus’ hand in his own. “You are an inventive, kind, and brilliant man. I am surprised you were able to recognize that in Wraith, but not in yourself.”

This time when the blood-moon glass flicks up at him, they betray an emotion far more inscrutable than simple fear. Brow furrowed, those eyes that match that which hides them ask something of Kelvin. They seem to be searching for sincerity, not expecting to find it, but hoping anyway.

“Please never think less of yourself because I’ve picked up a few more old tomes than you have,” Kelvin says. “It’s a matter of how we choose to spend our finite time on earth, not a matter of willingness or aptitude.”

Infernus has to break from Kelvin’s gaze, retreating. “I just did it because it was something I. Don’t know. Liked, I guess.”

“I resent the association between schooling and tedium. You think I began to study magical anomalies because it bores me?”

“No one on this damn planet could think that,” Infernus halfheartedly smiles.

“Stupendous to hear!” Kelvin pats his hand and leans back. “And, you know, it is never too late to get back into reading. If you truly enjoyed it.”

“…I did, yeah.”

“Wonderful! Then it is lucky you have a friend who already has an impressive oeuvre, and is willing to share his publications free of charge. I will grab you a few of my books to take for the road.”

“You cocky bastard,” Infernus chuckles.

In his twenty-month absence, Kelvin’s flat hasn’t changed a jot.

Something very much to be grateful for, when he’d only planned to be away for six of those. But when he’d died, the friends who’d watched his place hadn’t accepted that, and then much later than he had any right to he was found by that fortuitous little fishing boat. So things have been left undisturbed. First, in the expectation he’d be coming home any day, and after that, in memoriam.

Ever since his unlikely return, it’s only his desk that’s truly changed. The bed remains unused, the kitchen unstocked, but dozens of letters have sprung from his typewriter and there are still more answers to give.

But for the moment, he’s found a different occupation.

The call from the front lobby is the only thing that he’s willing to let pull him from his concentration, for it’s both expected and deeply entwined with his inspiration. He tells the receptionist to let the guest in, organizes his papers, and a few minutes later welcomes a bag-laden Infernus into his home.

“Thank you once again for this,” Kelvin says. “I greatly appreciate you getting these to me, Professor Dynamo and I’s research has ended up requiring far more back and forth than either of us expected. And he’s so hard to reach in person! I’m surprised you saw him before I did.”

“Busy as he is, he makes time for a guy who owes him a haberdashery trip,” Infernus says as he sets down the satchel. “Glad he thought to ask me. Was visiting The Dietrich uptown, your place is right on the way.”

“A friend of yours works there?”

“Yeah.” Infernus straightens, cracks his back, his long limbs reminding Kelvin of a pine tree bending in the wind. “Makes the best Manhattans outside ‘a Manhattan. You should swing by some time. The Dietrich’s a nice joint.”

“Certainly no nicer than Jezebel’s,” Kelvin assures.

“Don’t let us pull you into a rut, Kelv. Lotta great places ‘round New York.”

“Back when anything weaker than straight whiskey did something to me, I was in no danger of falling into a rut. Nowadays though, I am frequenting purely for the taste.” He beams. “And the company.”

“Heh,” Infernus says. “In that case, see you soon, alright brother?”

When he reaches for the aged and shineless door handle, Kelvin stops him with, “Before you go, I hoped I might show you something?”

Infernus blinks, watching as Kelvin returns to the desk, the centerpiece of his living room. As soon as he hands Infernus the draft of papers, a bout of déjà vu comes over him, and Kelvin is back in university handing in a paper that will determine the course of the rest of his life. Infernus reads. And reads. Kelvin tries not to fidget. Fails. After long past when he should have, he pulls out chairs for both of them. Infernus barely looks where he sits.

The fedora lifts up. “These are my stories.”

Kelvin swallows, trying to read something into Infernus’ inflection, offense or no.

“They are,” Kelvin says. “I truly could not stop thinking about them, I simply had to… get them on the page.” He leans closer, gesturing to his editorializations. “I know you are worried about protecting your old friends, I have taken care to obscure most personal details.”

“I can see that,” Infernus smirks. “Covered your tracks real well. That’s why you got the smooth-talkin’ Ixian called ‘Inferno’ as your leading man.”

“Ah,” Kelvin says, his relief quickly flushed away by embarrassment. “I have never ah… tried my hand at fictionalizing before. I found I was dreadfully inept at coming up with character names.”

“Workshop that one a bit.”

But despite that, Infernus is obviously pleased, glancing down at the loose pages and picking up where he left off.

“You said you don’t really do fiction?” he asks.

“No. Nor serialization for that matter,” Kelvin explains. “I have a knack for embellishing my own adventures, taking what exists and er… jazzing it up, but that’s all. I worried about striking a balance between anonymization and keeping to the heart of your stories.”

“Definitely don’t need to worry about that, this is good stuff.” Infernus waves the manuscript. “Way better than I woulda put it. Why start getting into crime stories now?”

“I’ve only now been inspired to do so.” With a cough, Kelvin quickly pivots, “And if my version is bowdlerized sufficiently to your tastes, I was wondering if I might have your permission to publish them? I have a connection at The Oracle that told me one of their Thursday serials is ending soon, and they’re looking to fill the slot. Some short, connected stories that — should the paper be satisfied with them — may be installed as a permanent program. With the Ritual over, I am in need of a new direction, and the one thing that’s truly given me direction was… this.”

“New start huh? Saw that,” Infernus teases. “Maybe workshop the pen name a bit too.”

“Sorry?”

Infernus holds up the first page. “Inferno and the Kings of Crime by Katill Leifson?”

“What do you mean by-? Oh.” Kelvin clears his throat. “Actually, you have that turned around. Kelvin is the pen name.” He manages to keep from stammering. “Kætill is… Kætill is me.”

“…Oh. Uh, sorry ice man…”

“It’s quite alright, I understand the confusion,” Kelvin says. “When I began writing for an international audience, I wanted to pick something that would be bold. Sophisticated! Something a true adventurer would have. Kelvin had a very good ring to it, and Kætill doesn’t exactly-” A minor catch overtakes him. “-Roll off an English-speaking tongue.”

“Don’t be hasty on that. Run it by me again?”

“Kætill Leifson,” Kelvin sounds out.

“Keh-till Leifson” Infernus repeats smoothly.

“Kæt-itl, in the back of the throat. Here.” Without thinking, he touches the side of Infernus’ neck, feeling the buzz of the retreating syllable.

The instant he realizes where he’s placed himself, he stiffens, though crucially does not allow his instinctual apology to have its way. The key here, he knows, is to play it off naturally.

“Anyway,” he says, sinking back into his chair. “The name is a bit old fashioned. Perhaps, also, I wished to distance myself from that which earned me so much teasing as a child.”

“You?” Infernus snickers. “Kinda hard to imagine you not being the most popular guy in any given room.”

Kelvin raises an eyebrow. “Really? It is hard to believe a short, chubby, ginger boy a little too interested in adventure stories would not earn the admiration of his peers?”

“I guess…” Though Infernus doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

“Oh, I was the victim of endless pranks,” Kelvin says. “Once, I had thought I’d endeared myself to group of other young boys, and we planned to sneak out at night to swim at the lake. Or at least, I planned to. Their plan was actually to steal my clothes and abandon me at the water, and I had to run home in the dark. In April!”

Kelvin laughs uproariously. Infernus only manages to look stricken.

“Your friends nearly killin’ you don’t really sounds like a ‘prank’…” Infernus ventures.

“There was no ice on the water,” Kelvin waves away. “I wasn’t actually in any danger of freezing. I suppose if it had been as cold as it should have been there would have been danger, but it was unseasonably warm that day.”

“You really know how to tell a story…” Infernus says. He blinks, staring at the papers before glancing to the wall clock, time having escaped him just as it has for Kelvin. “Crap.”

“Ah, right, seeing your friend-”

“Yeah, but hey.” Infernus drops a hand on Kelvin’s shoulder before he makes it out the door. “Look, you want my blessing you got it. On one condition.”

“Yes?” Kelvin asks.

“I get to be the first one to read them.”

The trunk’s lining smells like fear and caked blood.

My heart beats fast, far too fast, and I can empathize with that fear-scent because the dozens of people who have lain in this trunk before me must have known exactly how terrifying the dark is. There is a blindfold snared across my face, but even without it, the light deprivation would be absolute. Behind me is something heavy and unmoving—no doubt more bags of quicklime like the ones that keep me from fully extending my legs. The walls fold inward, crushing me down into the smallest manageable shape.

They’d raided my apartment with more mercenaries than I could handle, but only now—when I’m stripped of my ability to fight—do I finally feel the fear I’ve been keeping at bay.

I fantasize about sawing off the bindings around my wrists, of finding a spare shovel or torture device someone had carelessly left in the trunk, but I know the Administrator’s too smart for that.

The road rushes by. The throbbing of the lump on my head is my only company, the pounding of blood and the patter of desert road my only companions as I am taken far away from where anyone will hear my upcoming execution. I am alone. I’ve chased everyone away and the only one I can thank for that is myself, the decisions I made, the sacrifices I failed to take.

It is six months earlier and I wake up at five am sharp. I take a three minute navy shower under ice cold water (the boiler’s been out for months and I have neither the know-how nor the will to fix it) and shave in my toothpaste-spattered mirror. I wipe the lather off, check over my reflection, and determine everything to be satisfactory. My reflection salutes me back.

Breakfast is spam, freed from its metal prison with an army knife and dumped onto a griddle layered with grease. I’ll wash it some other time. Maybe when I remember to buy soap.

Morning drills. Uniform. Then the half hour walk to the end of my drive.

A rumble heralds the blue pickup truck, ancient but well cared for, wooden slats cadging its exterior so nothing will fall when transporting from one place to the other. It’ll hold until we get to Swiftwater.

“Hey there Sol,” Engineer greets as I clamber into the back.

I grunt in response.

To his credit, Engineer’s smile never loses his glamour, even when sticking out his self imposed task of talking to me. He glances to his right and offers amicably, “hey Smokey, why don’t you let Solly sit shotgun today?”

Pyro, half a box of the day’s matches littered around the passenger’s side, lifts their head and keens. The matches are black and curling, burned all the way down to the end as they’d let it caress their orange tipped fingers, chewing through them the way Spy decimates a box of cigarettes.

“I know you called it,” Engineer rebuts, “but wouldn’t it be nice to let someone else have a turn?”

More grumbles that I will never be able to parse. Engineer understands though, and he prods, finally making the other mercenary step voluntarily down from the cab and around to the back. I take their place next to the Engineer. It still smells of scorched phosphorus.

“So how was your weekend?” Engineer asks sanguinely, the long drive setting into my tailbone as the truck makes its journey over rougher and rougher roads while the mountains climb in front of us. “Didn’t get into any trouble at that convention, did ya?”

Inside my jaw, already clenched, frozen in its perpetual frown, my teeth grind. There are prices paid for a free ride into work every morning, and mine is that nine times out of ten Engineer treats me like a brain-dead geriatric. Like I’m Pyro. Thinks I’m one fig short of the whole tree and every minute detail is something to fuss over, thinks he has to watch over me the same way he babysits that idiot in the back of the truck who keeps lighting matches and then whining when the truck’s slipstream blows them out. That doesn’t stop them from lighting another one, nor bemoaning when the wind takes that one too.

“It was fine,” I grunt.

“Really now. Have a good time then?”

I almost want to say it. I almost want to tell it straight to his face that yes I damn well did, and that I met someone while I were there. That this someone isn’t like him, isn’t like anyone on BLU, who’s more fun than all of those bleating rubbernecks combined. Who doesn’t think of me as insane or a burden, but an honest to god friend, and has glimmer in his eye like he actually wants to hear what I’ll say next.

I want to say all that, but REDs and BLUs aren’t friends, and the brief, bitter satisfaction won’t make up for the broken contract lying in tatters at my feet, scrapped like the shriveled matches. Besides, the Engineer would be the worst person to tell. He’s more tied with BLU than any of us; no, this is something I have to keep close to my chest. A secret even. A good secret, one that the tighter you hold the warmer it makes you, the memory that I’m going to be seeing him again tonight glowing like a cigarette burn on my chest.

“Yeah. Real good time.”

I smile. This, I can tell, puts Engineer ill at ease.

The Red meets me outside a casino with a smart looking button-down and an even smarter grin. I could grow to like that grin. He throws an arm sideways across my shoulders.

“Got you good today, didn’t I,” he says by way of greeting, half a second to squeeze tight and then fall slack again, and it’s surprising how little that bothers me.

“And I got you back Cyclops, don’t forget it.”

We should be more pissed at each other. Blowing someone to gibs and then those gibs to gibs should warrant retribution, not reconciliation, not lingering warm where his sleeve is still pressed to my uniform as he prattles on. The casino ends up not letting us in that night. We don’t mind, especially when the words we could blow them up fall out of my mouth so easily, and the Demoman stares at me for one blinding second before a grin crawls up the sides of his face. I was right about learning to like that grin.

“You’re barmy,” he says a little breathlessly.

“I didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

The smile grows, a little manic, a little intoxicating. “I’ve got some gear in the car.”

Later that night I’ll run from the cops with this man at my side for the second time in three days. We’ll drive out far into the desert and stall the engine laughing, and I won’t care that the only thing keeping me company during cold night in the badlands is a man I barely know whose clothes are slightly singed. I lean over and put out the fire that’s been smoldering on his sleeve.

“Fuck,” he laughs at the sky, then repeats, “you’re barmy.”

This time I say nothing, and we get high on desert air and the lingering scent of gunpowder.

That night I put extra boards over my windows. I double, triple, quadruple check the door bar and I keep my shotgun close when I move so much as an inch from my vantage point behind the couch.

From here I can see everything as long as the filthy light filtered through layers of gray curtains can touch it: the sliver of bedroom, a good chunk of kitchen, the bathroom grimy and caked with mold. No one can come at me. There is no angle I cannot see and right now I need that comfort because things have been going too well. There is some sort of plot afoot—I already knew the rats in my ceiling have been corroborating with the delivery man from the Italian restaurant I sometimes order from, I just need a few more months of intelligence to get my proof—but this is an entirely new plot. A plot to make me lower my guard. A plot to make me consider inviting Demo over because I heard somewhere a long time ago that that’s what you do when you make a new friend. You hold their dirt-covered hand in theirs and wrap your knuckles on the screen door to ask your mother if so-and-so can come in and she says yes and then the two of you sit on the floor of your bedroom asking each other what you want to do for an hour. That’s definitely a thing that has happened, I’m sure of it. To someone who is me.

But that’s what children do. Civilians. Not Soldiers. This is barely a home, it’s my…bunker. My bunker with the leaky roof and the rats skittering directly above me and orchestrating their nefarious plots.

(I can hear them conversing. Dammit. Sounds like that deliveryman taught them Italian after all.)

If I sleep out here, behind the couch where I can see everything, maybe that will be a sound enough perimeter. If my base is secure beforehand then maybe…

I’ll see him again tomorrow. Across the other side of the gates sure, but it’ll be something. My heart beats fast as I drop my head on a commandeered pillow and lay flat on the floorboards.

“I don’t get it,” he says as we peer through the decal-plastered windows, glass so covered with rainbow silhouettes that we can barely see its innards.

I cock my shotgun. “What’s not to get, maggot? Inside these four walls is the greatest threat to America that this country has ever seen! Actually, wait-” The building is kind of weird-shaped, with various additions tacked on to the sides of the non-descript den of depravity. “Inside these, seven, eight, nine-” I shimmy my back against the brick so that I can lean around the corner. “-Ten, eleven, twelve walls is the most potent sort of depravity you will ever see in your likely very short lifespan, and you can bet your knee pads on that, Red.”

“And that depravity is…?”

“Disco.”

Demo frowns. “Disco.”

“You heard me maggot!”

“The music.”

“You underestimate the mind altering powers of song, and one day that will be your downfall!” I jam a finger at the vinyl stars obscuring my scouting attempts. “Here, they play that garbage for the youth, teach them how to gyrate their hips, spread lies about our national bird!”

“Is the turkey thing still bothering you? Look, I’m sorry I called it-”

“And then,” I press on. “They have the audacity to call that drivel music! It has rotted their brains to the point where I can no longer buy a decent pair of pants, so that is why we are breaking in and stealing all of their roller skates.”

“…I’ll admit, you’ve lost me.”

There’s no movement from inside, but that could change at any time. “Are you coming in or not?”

A second drags on, then he shrugs. “Eh, why not. Worth a laugh.”

The lock in the back snaps off easily enough. The lock on shoe storage is another matter.

“Oh, so it’s a roller disco,” Demo muses as I finally give up and shoot the thing off, yanking open the doors to reveal dozens upon dozens of rental skates. “Aw, these look fun. Blu look, this pair has stickers on it.”

He holds up a skate splattered with cartoon unicorns and a singular out-of-place pineapple.

“Careful private,” I warn, “first it’s ‘this looks fun’ then it’s ‘certainly it can’t be that seditious’ then next think you know you’re trying on skates and- Hey! Stop trying on those skates!”

It’s too late. In the half minute I’d lost track of my co-conspirator, he’d been seduced by the ways of Boney M., and is now struggling to his feet on red wheels.

“Bloody hell, how does anyone move in these things?” he asks as he uses the half-wall surrounding the dance floor to hoist himself up.

“I told you! It is the hip gyrations!”

“Ah, alright.”

“No! That does not mean do them!”

“I think it’s working though,” Demo says as he steadies, stepping out into the rink. “Oi! This isn’t so bad…ye can like, build up speed with these things, aye?”

“I would not know and it is not in my interests to find out!”

But despite my protests, my multiple warnings to the dangers of roller disco, my friend is lost to me, escaping out onto the ten thousand square-feet of smoothly polished hardwood.

I watch him mournfully. “I should have known your civilian-grade heart was not up to resisting the pull of funk. Defeated, before we even begin.”

“Don’t think of it as defeat, laddie!” he calls, halfway around the circuit, looking like an idiot as he struggles to keep himself upright, a smile imploding his face in hitherto unknown realms of joy. “We’re using their own skates against them! Their er…tools of destruction or whatever. It’s sabotage.”

“Better sabotage would be taking all these skates and throwing them in a lake. Or a volcano! Or a lake inside a volcano!” I say. “And their damn music too!”

“This music?” he asks. There’s a radio resting on a bench just outside the rink. There is suddenly no longer a radio on the bench as the Demoman zooms by and scoops it up. “Well would I look at this mate! They left one of their tapes in!”

“Do not push that button, Red! Do not think about pushing that button! Do not even think about not pushing that button!”

He slams the green triangle with his full fist. Immediately the barely lit amphitheater becomes a testament to the powers of Earth Wind & Fire, the disco music oozing in toxic waves from the now-in-motion radio, hitting me with its salacious shock wave.

“Noooooo…the unamericanness of it all…powers…weakening………”

“Don’t be such a baby,” Demo whizzes by, a fast learner of the ill omened. “You know what your problem is? You don’t know how to vandalize private property properly. It’s supposed to be fun!”

“I will have fun when you turn that racket off!”

“You want this?” He holds up the radio, fist around the handle, dangling it in a taunt if I ever saw one. “Come and get it.”

He scoots away on his stupid little shoes.

I will not let this Red beat me. He’s toying with me now, that maddening smile lighting up his whole face; it’s a bit crooked and I hate what it does to the warmth in my face and the pace of my heart. He shouldn’t be doing things like that to my ticker. I have a condition.

“You.” Each word comes out trodden and growled, forced through gritted teeth so he knows exactly how much he’s going to regret this. “Are going to regret this.”

I walk over and arm myself. Leg myself. Dammit, whatever, I put the stupid shoes on.

“CHAAAARGE,” I scream as I barrel onto the floor, my newly acquired skates immediately shooting out from under me and sending me sliding forward on my ass. “Dammit! Red! Reveal the secrets to these things at once!”

“Gotta find a rhythm, laddie,” he says as he slides past, going backwards now, the showoff.

I’ll never catch him at this rate. More delicately this time, I get to my feet, holding out my hands in case the treacherous footwear decides to turn on me again. Demo skates circles around me, the music yet playing, joy on his face that’s making my heart pump in time to the beat. With a battle cry, I lunge at him, but he only steps aside, and I go skittering past. Like a bull against a matador. A bull who is also on rollerskates.

“Try to stay upright before going forward,” he says. “Here.”

Here is all the warning I get. In the brief lapse of seconds, an arm loops under mine from behind, and I am helped to my feet as he chuckles in my ear.

I should make a grab for the radio. I should, but he’s the only thing holding me up and suddenly I don’t care as much about the stupid music box as I did a moment ago. Not when my skate keeps slip-sliding in-between his and it brings us chest to chest.

“Careful. Careful. There you go, nice and steady.” His arm is firm around my waist, and though I’m steady I’m finding it difficult to concentrate when his amused snort blows warm air on my neck. “Can I let I go?”

No. “Yes,” I grunt. “I am aaah-” Balance gone, quickly regained. “…I am fine. I have mastered your infernal sport. I am the supreme champion of roller disco.”

“Well looky you!” he snickers and I should use my shovel to smack that sarcasm out of him. “We should have ourselves a wee race then, if you’re so cocksure!”

“You’re on, Buster!”

But he’s off already, and maybe I’ve been hustled because there’s no way he can be this good when he’s lapping me, two, three, four times by the time I make a single revolution of the neon splattered auditorium. He’s left the radio on the red star in the center of the floor and whatever space-drugs they deal in this place must have lingering fumes because I don’t even want to go kick it over. I want Demo to keep shouting useless hints at me. I want him to run into me every now and again as he tries to help my posture and end up knocking us both over.

Somehow we’re back in the center again. He nearly falls over and this time it’s my turn to snicker, a meandering rumble that won’t stay in my chest even as I close my lips to it, and eventually I give up and laugh outright. He does too. His momentum comes towards me and mine towards him but instead of crashing the two of us catch each other, spinning around in opposing velocities, skates scratching half-moons in rubber.

So I keep laughing. I’m not even sure what about anymore. We’re in orbit.

He presses his forehead against mine. I hold him more than strictly necessary. It’s hard to breathe, and Demo must not know why he’s laughing either because he keeps doing it. The music thrums, perfect and joyous, and I keep spinning.

The whirr of distant police sirens cuts through the din.

Demo pulls back. “Guess that’s our cue.”

“Always is.”

I didn’t manage to destroy any of the skates but, who knows. Maybe there’ll be a next time. It doesn’t seem so important now as Demo’s car makes the long journey up my driveway, my heart thumping away the giddy adrenaline while my head becomes clearer in direct relation to my distance to home. I’m painfully aware of it as I stand there at the stoop, needles on my skin, broken filaments winding their way around my fingers. Raw, weeping, shockingly aware, but still I ask anyway.

If he wants to come in.

He does.

I show him my magazine collection, my seven unique army knives (for opening breakfast each day of the week, so by the time I come back around to Monday Knife all the dried meat has flaked off), my various recruitment posters that the pawn shop was just going to throw away—treasonous bastards. There are medals on my mantel. I take them down one by one and explain what they’re for, but halfway through I notice how he’s stopped looking at the medals and is looking at me instead.

I stop talking. He keeps looking.

I take his wrist. He doesn’t pull back, doesn’t press forward either, just looks at me with a tilt to his head. There is no skate-induced orbital momentum pulling us together this time but still my forehead brushes against his again and my breath falls from my lungs into his. It’s no longer jittering, no longer giddy, and he is leaning further to get as much surface area of me as possible. My chin, my lips; but he makes me be the one to make that final plunge into the abyss where our mouths connect.

Pyro wouldn’t know if it hit them upside the head, but Engineer catches on right away. I’m smiling too much. It feels weird and foreign on my face but I can’t help it, even when he shoots me looks for the next four months on morning drives and rides home. I don’t care. BLU, the Administrator, the whole damn world—I don’t care about any of them. Sometimes the bond between two men who steal roller skates is an indescribable thing, and no one can take that away from me. We can chuck grenades and fire artillery at each other as much as we please, him standing over what remains of me in his detonated stickie trap and giving a smart little two-fingered salute, and it won’t mean anything. I grin, blood on my teeth and dripping out my mouth, and I tell him I’ll get him back.

“We could blow them up,” I say.

“Sounds like we’re repeating ourselves already.”

“I didn’t hear a ‘no’.”

He grins, that delighted, awe-inspiring grin that I love, and kisses me brusquely on the mouth before heading to the car. It’s a wonderful, steady rhythm we have, and he loads explosives into my arms until I can barely move. Tavish knows the most efficient places to kick out structural supports, wisdom laid out like a map on the back of his hand, says that he used to do normal demolition work a long time ago, between jobs or when the work itself slowed to a drip drip drip. The faucet in my apartment does that sometimes. All the time. It lets me know that the water’s still there, that it hasn’t been replaced by Feds with something worse.

The Feds haven’t bothered me of late. This occurs to me as I’m retreating to a safe distance, behind some cars near the soon-to-be-leveled autopark. My employers don’t take issue with my extracurricular activities—legality is a case of not throwing grenades in glass houses—but tangoing with law enforcement can sometimes get hairy. Maybe someone else is on my tail then. Nazis, or Commies, or Commie-Nazis-

I gasp. Men in coats—coats and red hats!—are entering my targeted location. Every suspicion confirmed! Those commies are on to me. Who else would be wearing red hats but them?

I will need to intercept them immediately. Quickly, I dive from my hiding spot and sprint after them, already running through scenarios on how I’m going to squeeze information out of them, twisting their arms until they tell me exactly how they found where Tavish and I were planning to-

There’s a sharp crackling to my left, just inside the garage’s door. It hits me suddenly that this might have been a bad idea.

“Crap,” I say.

The first detonation knocks out the office from where I came, and I don’t give it a chance to catch up to me. I slam into the emergency exit, back between rows of metal shelves, only familiar to I since my foray brought me through here less than an hour before. Another few feet is all I’m able to cover before the shockwave ripples out, heat catching out from under me and flinging me forward into the pavement outside.

I get some nice skid marks on my face. Not fatal, but I groan as I push myself up.

The autoshop is in ruins. Great, fiery ruins that resemble more a burning oil pit than anything a human could inhabit. I watch it, for a while, maybe just maybe getting why Pyro keeps lighting those matches only to let them go out.

“Jane! Jane, please, oh god please, Jane where are you-”

I’ve never heard Tavish sound like that before. Pain, pain I’ve heard, I’ve felt, I’ve caused, but the screaming skirting the edges of the fire is terror like I’ve never been witness to. I call out, because of course I don’t want him to be worried, I’m just fine after all, but then that call is filled with more coughing than I thought there would be.

I try again. “Tav…” Then dissolve into another fit.

“Jane!”

Now he’s closer, finally scrambling into view, and my ears did not deceive me because pain is exactly what his face is too. He runs at me full tilt, crashing down beside me and practically hauling me into his arms. It’s a rough way to be returned to a sitting position, but I don’t have enough strength to do more the lean my head against his chest.

“Fuck. Oh fuck, Jane I- oh god I thought I did it again, Jesus-”

The crying I’ve heard too, but mostly when he’s drunk, long and bemoaning and a few firm hugs will usually get it out of him. This is not that, nor intemperance—more like he keeps forgetting he’s crying at all, tears only flowing out in between the gaps in the panic. It feels a bit much. Sure I’m a little singed, but not enough that he needs to squeeze me like he’s going to keep me from being dragged off to hell himself.

“I saw you running back in, but by then the fuses were already lit and I- Fuck,” he hisses. “What in the bloody hell was that about!? Why on Earth did you go in there?”

“Saw some Commies,” I explain, now that he’s not holding me so tight and I can breathe a bit better. “Followed them. Needed to figure out what they’re doing here, how much they know!”

“…Commies?”

“Communists! Ruskies, Tavish. Those men that went in with the red hats!” This is followed by a cough.

“…The firefighters?” The pain is melting, something uglier underneath as Tavish leans back and grits his teeth. “You ran back into a building rigged to explode because you thought the firefighters were communists?”

“I did not think, I know!”

“Damn right you didn’t think.” He gets to his feet, pacing around I and tearing off his beanie one-handed so he can rub his nails along his scalp. “Goddamnit Jane I thought I-” He lifts a hand in my direction as though to make some elaborative gesture, but none comes, and he lets it fall back down to his side. “Damn you.”

“I do not know why you’re getting mad at me. I was doing my American duty.”

His silhouette against the crackling building is inscrutable and everything smells like extinguished dynamite.

Tavish is silent as he drives me home. It’d dark inside, out later and more disastrously than most of our excursions. Tavish reaches for the light switch, but I bark at him, “are you crazy? Keep those that damn things off! Do you want to give away our location to every sniper in the closest mile?”

“Me?” And crap, I knew this fight was coming, could taste it like copper on my tongue. “I’m the crazy one? Bloody hell Jane, what in the hell were you thinking out there? You could have- I almost-”

“I don’t see what the big deal is,” and maybe I don’t. I fold my arms. I don’t look at him. If I could see it, I choose not to. “What’s done is done maggot.”

“Oh really? Something like that’s never going to happen again? Never happened before?” He throws his arms about wildly. “Jesus, I never minded, you know. All ‘o this. It was even fun at first.”

“Oh it was fun was it?” I snap. “When it’s all explosions and minor property damage it’s fun, but as soon as the going gets tough I’m too much for you, private?” The words spit like acid, too real–I was never good at clouding in metaphor, hiding what I wanted to say even as it stings leaving my lips. “Go on! Say it! I have heard it a thousand times and once more from your sorry excuse for a pie-hole won’t make a difference.”

“Don’t you dare try to make it about that,” he snarls. “I had to watch. I thought I killed someone I love again and-” He sputters to a stop. “I…I make it worse don’t I?”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“You. I encourage you. I make it worse.”

“This is not about you.” But he’s already withdrawing. I can see it in his eye that I’m losing him. I know that if I don’t say something now it will all fall apart.

Instead, I do the worst thing imaginable: I cough. I keep coughing.

He looks away in shame. “I don’t know if I can keep doing this.”

It feels inevitable. A blade moving slowly toward you that you have no power to stop, but tears into you all the same. The hurt is so strong I file it into a fine point of rage and stare it into him.

“Figures.”

All of him withdraws. “Jane…I need to…take some time.”

“Just go.”

“I…I don’t want to end things but I need-”

“Go,” I repeat.

He does. The apartment is empty. The way I always wanted it.

“Something the matter, Soldier?” Engineer asks, too delicately, too everything, and it makes me want to reach over and strangle him.

I curl my lip at the dashboard, and say, “I’m going to sit in the back.”

He doesn’t utter a word as I open the cab door and drop onto the packed badlands sand.

No reply when I clamber into the truck bed either, from he or Pyro, a thick rumble of the ignition turning over as his response. I should talk to him. It could help, maybe with the guilt, maybe with the questions that chase each other around inside my head—but I can’t bring myself to, not even when it looks like things are over. I’d have to explain I’ve been cavorting with a Red, and I can’t sink to that sort of betrayal. Of myself or of Tavish.

So instead I sit, silently existing next to a squirming rubber suit as the truck takes the three of us into work. Today Pyros has a lighter rather than their matches, and they can keep it lit for around fifteen seconds at a time before the wind takes it away.

They’re awfully quiet. I’ve always thought that, but it’s not exactly true, not between their joyous coos and their equally despondent wails when the light finally goes out. It’s just that they don’t have a lot to say, at least not that anyone besides Engineer can understand. They depend on him to translate; they depend on him for most things, actually.

“How do you stand it?” I ask them.

Pyro, having not actually engaged in a word of conversation with me before this, looks up from their lighter. They tilt their head, noise of confusion tumbling through the mask.

“Engineer. Always having him…fuss over you. Drives me goddamn crazy.”

They shrug, humming something happily, cheerful even though the flame has gone out. They know they can just light it again.

“It doesn’t bother you that he thinks you’re too incompetent to be left on your own?” I don’t mean it to sound so bitter, so projected, or to reveal that’s what think about them too too.

The string of words is accompanied by a shake of their head. I even catch some of them, something along the lines of not like that. That’s what friends do. They tug on my elbow slightly.

“Me? I don’t need anyone looking out for me, Smokey. I already have a friend, and it’s not like that.” I stop, a tightness in my throat. “Had a friend.”

The oh noooooo is clear enough to anyone, especially since Pyro has a habit of over-emoting—I’ve never been sure if this is compensation for the mask, or if they’ve always been that way. The tugging on my arm increases to practical shaking. They want to know what happened.

I intake through my nose. It’s still inside of me, the confusion, the knowing that something’s gone wrong. It all wants to come out but…

Pyro’s quiet. If anyone can keep a secret, it’s them.

“Alright here Pyro, this conversation does not leave the back of this truck.” I glance furtively through the rear window, but Engineer’s eyes are locked firmly on the road. “I have been…fraternizing. With a Red.”

They put both hands to their face and gasp in horror.

The whole sordid story comes out. I talk until my mouth is dry, which is an accomplishment because usually I can spend a whole day shouting myself hoarse with no ill effects, but some time during the telling I find that my throat has swollen up.

“I wish that…” I stop myself. Wishes are for children and hippies and I am neither. Not some snot-nosed kid anymore. “I…want whatever it was before. When shit made sense and there weren’t these damn…questions.”

Pyro murmurs in agreement. Before I have a chance to stop them, they wrap their arms around me with the force of a train.

“Oof,” I say.

In response, they reply something to the effect of you still have us.

“We are not friends, cupcake,” I say.

They giggle, and I don’t pull them off. Engineer shoots the two of us a look when he finally gets out of the truck, but all I manage to is sigh. He chuckles empathetically.

And, well. I do feel better. I’m still not sure…if Tavish is ever coming back. Maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he was right. Maybe I’m too far gone, and fellow lunatics are all I deserve.

The Voice shows me a video that proves beyond the maybe.

“A fraud,” I seethe. “How dare he. How dare he, I’ll-”

It’s not his voice. Even I know that. I know lots of things, rattling around in there, but they’re like old knick-knacks in the back of the garage. Knowing how things should be or how I should act do not weigh the way they should, and rage is a far more powerful shaper of a man’s actions than the things he has shoved away.

“I will rip him limb from limb! I will string him up by his own intestines! I will tear off his head and beat him to death with it, he promised he-”

She is pleased with the barely intelligible tirade as I pace about. The TV man does not leave.

After a while it occurs to me that she’s waiting for something.

I turn. “When.”

“When what, Mister Doe?” She is now less pleased.

“When did he say that. When is this video from.”

She wasn’t expecting me to ask that. One of the little things rattling around in my head tells me that much.

“Does it matter?”

A man who left rather than think he was hurting me, even indirectly. When would he have said that. What would have prompted it.

The Voice is like the rest: she thinks me one short. Barely worth the effort. Someone who dances to her tune with the barest of prompting.

“…It doesn’t matter what he said,” I conclude, and the background voices cheer. “I won’t do it.”

“I assure you Mister Doe,” the woman inside the little box attached to the scrawny civilian says. “This man has taken a contract on your life. Your choices are to defend myself using the weapons we provide you or-” Her eyes are cold, even through the screen. “-We will do his work for him.”

He said he never wanted to hurt me. I never wanted to hurt him. I snarl in her direction. “I’d like to see you try, lady.”

In the end, there were far too many of them. I valued my bunker for its difficulty to locate rather than its own merits, and though that had served me well for many years it was never meant to be unassailable. I killed seven of her men before someone brought a baton hard across the back of my helmet.

I can still feel the welt.

It throbs in time with the car’s engine, close as I am with my cheek pressed against the fuzz of the lining, thinking about my missing helmet, my smashed medals on the mantle. The apartment that I’ll never see again. The Demoman that I’ll…

I’ve never been a quitter, but it’s hard to see a way out of this one. I chose my side and my side was not betraying my best friend—this is my prize for that. If only her people been as lazy with the bindings around my wrists and ankles as they had been with the gag that now hangs around my chin, damp and tasting vaguely of motor fluid, but they know where to put their priorities. I don’t bother screaming for help. I can tell from the long stretch of straight road that I’m far outside of civilization. It won’t be long now.

“God damn it,” I say, words so bitter I want to sandpaper them off my tongue, scrub my eyes until the shame behind them goes away. But I don’t have that ability, so I hiss quietly to my audience of no one.

Which is what I think until the bags of quicklime behind me move.

There’s another person tied in this trunk with me. My heart hammers as the jolt of dread forces itself into me like an ice pick behind the eye, because the only person in the world they would bother executing at the same time is-

“Tavish?”

The object behind me, halfway through the process of waking from its own concussion, pauses.

“Hmmn?” it groans.

The shame I’ve been trying to hold back reigns victorious.

“Fuck,” I say, grieving the single word.

It takes some minutes in the dark trunk, but try as we might there is no space to turn around, no way to angle ourselves to get at each other’s restraints. Some friction and a few banged skulls, and Tavish manages to get the gag out of his mouth.

The only thing that follows is long seconds of silence.

I’m painfully aware that we have precious few of those, and I feel them slipping away like sand down an hourglass. I can’t break the silence, though, not with how his breath is shaking, not when I know too well what trying to hide tears sounds like.

When he finally speaks, it’s with his face pressed against the PVC while he says, “I’m so sorry.”

“What?” I ask, because it’s the last thing I expected him to say now.

“I had these photos. I just wanted some memories of us, but I kept some of those photos of two of us together, and they must have found them, I’m so stupid I-”

“Tav,” I say. “Shut up.”

He hiccups into silence.

“I’m not letting you blame yourself for this too,” I tell him. “We’ve both been careless as shit, and- fuck- I never got to say sorry either. For running into that building. I know I’m not…all together sometimes but…thank you. For coming back for me.”

I want nothing more than to put his hand in mine.

He’s crying. Quietly, but there isn’t much room that he can hide it from me. After more seconds and more sand he says, “we’re really going to die, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. Seems like it.” I swallow. “So. They offered you the same deal, huh?”

“Looks like. I thought something like this would happen, but when I heard what they were asking me to do I just…I couldn’t.”

“…Is your Mum alright?”

He breathes in sharp. “I-I dunno. They got me good and I don’t know if…”

I regret asking. I regret more not being able to bury my face into his chest. “She’s fine. I’m sure of it. She’s a tough old lady.”

“…Aye. That she is.” And there’s no use worrying otherwise, not any more.

More silence, thrum of an empty highway.

He says, “maybe we should have just said yes.”

“Really?” I ask.

“Aye. Knowing what we know now, don’t you want to go back and take the deal? We’d probably tear each other to bits, but at least we’d still be alive.”

“I don’t think I would,” I say after a while. “I love you Tavish. I wouldn’t trade that for the world. It was all worth it, in my book.”

“Oh,” he says. The sniffles get louder, then slower again, rising and falling like a tide. He croaks, “I think you’re worth it too. And if…if we’d had more time, I would have tried harder. For us.”

“I would have tried harder too.”

When the Administrator’s men finally lift the lid of the trunk, we both have to quell tears before facing the woman on the screen.

It’s a gravel pit, just like she promised. People I don’t recognize—dressed like the ones who raided my apartment with their purple jumpsuits and black masks—surround us as white light and grey gravel fill my vision. We’re not even given the dignity of standing up, simply grabbed under an arm on each side and hauled bodily into the waiting pit below. Another man, another TV screen. We’re thrown on our knees before it.

“Mr. DeGroot. Mr. Doe. I would like you to know it is a vast understatement when I say this outcome is…disappointing.”

Her expression is just as chilling as it was a few hours ago, leaned over her switchboard like she could reach through the screen and strangle me with her press-on nails. I’d like to see her try. If there’s one thing I could out-strangle it’s a single arm coming out of an idiot box.

“Our mercenaries are expected to maintain a certain standard of conduct,” the Administrator goes on. “Of loyalty. And yet here you are. You have both betrayed me and your employers with your open disregard for self control, with your friend-making. The only glimmer of salvageable material from your foolish breach in contract is that when your long and excruciating deaths are complete, your coworkers will learn from your example and think before toeing the line in the future. You could have listened to your conscious-”

“Jesus lady,” Tavish cuts in with an exhausted eye roll. “You’re jealous, we get it.”

I snort. And why not? It’s not like I have anything else to lose at this point, why not get in a little gallows humor. Tavish shoots me a grin that lets me know that jibe was just for me.

The Administrator is less amused. “Shoot that one first.”

The man closest to Tavish lowers his shotgun, and in less than a second after the order the Demoman jerks as a shot louder than a rocket reverberates through the gravel pit. I can’t even flinch. All I can do is stare as Tavish crumples to the ground, groaning as blood and worse flows from his abdomen. Just like that. Snap of the fingers, and the smallest victory turned back into a nightmare.

“If we can continue,” she says. “As I said, your gross insubordination will be-”

My mouth works silently. She keeps going with her petty, nearly childish speech, but I can’t hear it. Too busy staring at Tavish’s prone form, watching as he tries to clutch his stomach while his hands are bound around his back. All he can do is bring his knees close to his chest as he spills blood onto the gravel. I’m pulled from my shock enough to try and squirm feebly toward him, but the hand on the back of my neck holds me firm and all I can do is watch.

He looks up and tries to find my eyes. Then a wave of pain rolls over him and he whimpers, curling in closer until I can’t see his face.

“-the lack of respect for ones employers-”

“I am going to kill you!” The certainty of those words finds me, and through them my voice shakes loose, reality tossed to the side as rage takes his place. “I will not die here, do you hear me you pathetic, maggoty little crone? I am going to find you and tear your throat with my teeth! You can take every single weapon from my hands but that will not protect you useless, shit-eating, worm.”

My lungs wheeze just from that effort. She blinks tiredly in my direction. “Beat that one until he stops talking.”

A boot takes me in the side of the head.

I don’t stop shouting though, and if they’re going to beat me until then, it’s going to be a while. The need to go to Tavish is overridden by the desire to tear every single one of them to pieces, to a pile of human remains their mothers wouldn’t recognize. They throw me to the ground, raining down far worse than what I received at my apartment, worse than I’ve ever received. Ribs shatter like glass light bulbs, splitting open and lodging themselves in my insides as a blow to my head is joined by a dozen more. They kick my groin, and when I curl up defensively they instead go for my spine, digging steel-toed shoes until I can barely feel at all.

I only stop yelling when breathing becomes more important. By that time, my nose is too much snot and broken cartilage to use, and my mouth is too much smashed teeth.

Briefly, I catch sight of Tavish, when my face comes to the ground and the two of us am at eye level for once. He can’t see me anymore. His eye is open, dead and glossy, and a new wave of anger and grief wells up inside of me and I will kill each and every one of you. You will all goddamned pay. How dare you, how dare you. In a second I will stand up. I will avenge both of us. I will make them pay, I will kill them for ever having made us hide in the first place.

But I can’t. I’m going to die. All that working on breathing and it’s just getting slower, a hand on the back of my neck picks me up and slams me down again, and me and…

Couldn’t save him, just like he couldn’t save me from myself.

No one will even know. Miles from civilization, from water, from anything, the only thing I had was him and no one will remember me. As the darkness closes in on my vision, I think that there’s no one out here but us and our executioners.

So then why’s the sound of a car getting so loud?

It takes exactly four seconds for everything to change. One moment I’m lying face down while a knee presses into my back, the next the engine’s thrum becomes an ear splitting roar as a blue flatbed truck comes fuming overhead, clearing the pit as it goes tearing through space. Well, mostly clearing. It clips the man holding me, missing me by feet and tearing him off me. A second later the truck lands, taking out the farthest men and splattering them like particularly mushy bowling pins. The air is screaming. My nostrils fill with engine oil. I lift my head in sheer incredulity.

The entire gravel pit jumps to action as the mercenaries now have something much more pressing to deal with as a blue-suited maniac jumps out of the passenger seat and shakes a flamethrower over their head.

“…Pyro?”

My question, spoken in disbelief, is answered by a belch of flame from the thrower’s end, engulfing the nearest huddle of TF mercs who’ve only now drawn their weapons. As they scream, another figure leans out the driver’s side window and fires a shotgun shell into the closest bystander.

One of those mercs initially crushed under the truck’s tire was the one sporting the television screen. I know, because as I feebly try to lift myself and comprehend what just happened, I can hear, “what is going on out there?” The screen rolls further into the pit. “Mercenaries! Answer me!”

In reply, the nearest three mercenaries scream as they’re burned alive.

“Too many!” Engineer yells, a return shot taking off his side mirror. “Grab him and let’s get out of here!”

I still haven’t processed the truck’s arrival, let alone that I’m the him in question. Not until a pair of strong, gloved hands are haul me to my feet, and a fire axe cuts the bindings around my wrists and ankles. I stagger. Pyro catches me.

“No, wait,” I wheeze. “Give me a shovel. I will disembowel every last one of them.”

Pyro hudda huhs in the negative. They drag me, but will I kill them, every last one of them, I will…

The truck revs its engine, and my heart lurches as I remember-

“No! No wait!”

Pyro’s taking me away from him. Tavish is still curled on the ground, and I will not leave him, I have to go back, to stand over his body and kill anyone who tires to touch him. Pyro follows my gaze.

“Please,” I say, because they know, they have to understand. “I can’t leave him.”

“We don’t got time for that!” Engineer calls out his window as he provides cover fire, the two of us almost into the truck. I can’t let them take me away-

Pyro shoves me the last few feet upward, into the truck bed. “No,” I beg. “I can’t-”

But Pyro, blessed, godsent Pyro does not join us. They turn around, locate the best path back into the bottom of the gravel pit, and charge in.

“Dammit,” Engineer calls. “Pyro he’s a goner just-”

Pyro runs back into the line of fire still aimed in the truck’s direction, immediately dropping to their knee and fireman-hauling Tavish onto their shoulder. The air is so full of bullets yet still they run, gravel splashing underfoot, their flamethrower offering no protection as they storm the last few feet to the truck.

They crash clumsily into the back, shoving Tavish into my arms. There is a noise in my throat—what kind it was meant to be I can’t be sure with my broken face and broken body but oh god he’s still warm.

“Tavish,” I breathe. “Tavish, please, oh god please…”

My arm is broken but goddamn if I don’t pull him as close to me as I can, burying my face in his neck, silently begging him to still be in there. My hands find his wound, putting as much pressure as I can, thinking how if I can just stop the bleeding everything will be OK.

“Go go go!” Pyro says, and the truck speeds up and over the lip of the pit in a hail of gravel.

Gunfire recedes behind us. They might follow us, but I’m pretty sure Pyro torched their rides in that first round of flamethrower-ing. Good. I fucking hated that trunk.

A minute of silent car ride passes. Then two. It might as well have been another friendly carpool to work.

Pyro scoots closer, mumbling, “is he…?”

“I…” I say.

Tavish stirs, fighting back to consciousness.

“Tavish,” I say. “Tav you’re alive. Christ we’re alive.”

His eye flicks open, those long lashes fluttering for just a second before closing again. “Oh. That’s good.”

I lift my head to look at the two around me, the ones I have to thank for that. People who were barely coworkers. People who maybe should have been my friends but…well, I didn’t think they actually cared.

“How did you…?” I ask, not sure how to finish. But then my eyes fix on the back of Engineer’s helmet, unmoving as he stares ahead at the road. “You. Your family.”

“Yeah me,” Engineer snorts derisively. “And I burned a lot of bridges taking advantage of those family connections, all just to save your sorry ass. What were you even thinking getting mixed up with a Red?”

My head spins to Pyro, somehow mildly betrayed even under the pain and the…everything else. “You said you wouldn’t tell him!”

“Nuh-uh. Said it wouldn’t leave the back of this truck. I told him in the back.”

I’m flabbergasted; not only by Pyro’s blatant misinterpreting of friendship confidentiality agreements, but by the fact that I understood most of what they just said.

“Hmph,” I mutter. “Well all that bridge burning is going to go to waste if we don’t get a dispenser back here soon.”

“Can’t drive and build a dispenser at the same time, now can I?” We’re moving slow enough now that I can hear Engineer when he shouts out the open back window. “I figure we go straight to Medic. Who knows, maybe he’ll throw his life and career out the window too, just like all of us. You realize that right? That ‘cause we’re doing this for you, me ‘n Pyro are out of a job?”

“Oh, out of the job,” Tavish says faintly. “Must be real terrible for you.”

This reminder, that he’s here, that he’s still breathing, prompts me to pull him closer if that were even possible. The chuckle I want comes out as more of a dry sob. I kiss Tavish’s cheek, still not quite believing this is real. Sure we’re now fugitives from the two most powerful companies in America, but we’ve got a truck and some friends and a lot of open highway.

“I love you,” I say so Pyro and Engineer don’t overhear.

He reaches up, and pulls me down until our foreheads touch.

“I meant what I said about trying harder,” I tell him. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Aye.” His hand is warm against the side of my neck. “I think we’ve proved that we’re both too thick-headed to give up on this.”

“What do you think we should do now?”

The Demoman didn’t move, his chin resting on folded arms and upper half lying on Soldier’s chest.

Soldier moved his gaze from the clouds he had been watching to the man lying on top of him, pretending to consider the question carefully.

“I have a good idea of what we can do,” he replied, letting his mouth turn into a slight grin.

Demo burst into a raucous laugh, putting his hand to his face. “It’s six o’ clock man! Don’t you think it’s a little early tae be puttin’ your ankles above your head?”

“Negatory! It is never to early to enjoy sexual intercourse.” Despite attempting to appear genuine, Soldier couldn’t help but let his grin widen, always glad to make Demo laugh. Usually it wasn’t on purpose, but it made him feel satisfied all the same.

Demo rolled off Soldier onto the grass still laughing. He pressed himself into Soldier’s side, enjoying the warm sunlight and the peace this weekend had brought them. It wasn’t often RED and BLU gave extended furloughs, but when they did the two enemies-by-daylight always managed to sneak off together. The camping trip had been Demo’s idea, saying he wanted to get away from Viaduct and get out to some proper trees and hills. Of course the fact that they were away from prying eyes and risk of discovery by either of their employers was also a consideration.

“We should take a walk,” Demo said after his laughter had died and he had returned to considering their evening plans.

“A walk?”

“Aye, a hike around the lake. Stretch our legs. Try to enjoy a bit o’ nature while we still have daylight.”

Soldier snorted. “Nature? Man does not need nature to feel whole and true! Two hundred years ago man feared nature! And without Paul Revere to invent the six-story building, we would still need to fear it! Pray to God that we have bullets, fire, and entrenching tools so that true Americans are able to fend off the unseelie hoards of the wilderness. You should think about that before you go prancing off into the unknow.” He tried to keep his expression serious throughout the duration of his rant.

Demo got to his feet, laughing again. “Is that so? When then I suppose I’ll take that hike by meself. Though,” he added pointedly “If you do want a bit ‘o company later I might be a bit more inclined t’wards people who bother tae spend some quality time with me.”

Soldier paused, pretending to consider carefully again. “Well…if you do intend to venture out on this foolhardy mission, I believe there is nothing I can do to stop you. And because you are not American I suppose you do have to fear nature.” He got to his feet smiling at Demo. “And since you need to fear nature it is my duty as a true American to protect you from the jaws of the forest and its vicious fauna. Go on! I will take the rear guard as we make our around this reservoir of Mother Nature’s deadly power.”

“Aye?” Demo chuckled. “Well then I’m glad I have you here tae protect me.” They walked away from the lake, bare feet padding on the grass that eventually turned into the hard dirt of the campsite.

It was a sparse site; it held only a cook fire and a tent they had pitched last night before becoming to tired to do anything else. After breakfast the next morning they had spent the whole day fishing, at least until they had run out of grenades. After that they tried using shotgun shells, but it just wasn’t the same. That had turned into an argument about whether a shotgun or a sticky launcher was a better secondary weapon, which had turned into a round of fisticuffs, which had turned into them rolling around trying to beat the crap out of each other, which eventually led to them just lying in the grass with Demo breathing heavy and Soldier watching the clouds.

Seemingly fine at being roped into a hike, Soldier watched Demo put his boots back on. The trees and hills may have reminded Demo of home, but they didn’t do anything for the Soldier. What really made this trip special wasn’t the great outdoors: it was the company. Sure the he wore a red shirt instead of a blue, and sure he was Scottish, and sure he didn’t understand a shotgun could kick the crap out of any weapon that required hiding behind corners like a chicken liver…but he was so extraordinary in every other way. He had a laugh that could make anyone smile. He never talked down to Soldier, or told him he was crazy. In fact, most of the time when Soldier had an idea, he not only went along with it but he would find some way to make it better. He never complained about the raccoons or the severed heads, and he always had a compliment for anyone who didn’t think they were worth something.

“So, you coming ‘rear guard’?” Demo interjected. “Or just you just going tae stare at me until that helmet falls o’er your eyes?’

Soldier hadn’t realized he’d been staring. He turned away and muttered a hurried “coming,” before lacing up his own boots. He slung his shotgun over his shoulder and crammed a handful of shells into his ammo pouch. He also remembered to douse the fire and grab a couple of water bottles for the hike.

By the time he was ready Demo was already at the foot of the trail, telling him “’Mother Nature’s deadly power’ is goin’ tae freeze me toes off before you ever get o’er here.”

“We should be going counter-clockwise around the lake,” Soldier responded.

“And why would we do that?”

“It is natural for humans to walk counter-clockwise. I read that in a book!”

Demo scoffed. “And you believe that?”

“Affirmative!” Soldier didn’t really care which way they went, and he doubted Demo did either. It was just a simple sort of argument that let them fall into their comfortable bickering. “In fact, you are denying your humanity by leading us around this lake the wrong way.”