The Infinite Middle

Jullus peels off his gloves to check for frostbite, breath falling out of his mouth in heavy, watery clouds.

Does he remember how to move his fingers? Yes — for a small mercy, the synapses between brain and finger are preserved. But numbness filters upstream, from his fingers to his wrists, and it blots his mind in fear, even though he knows, logically…

He knows it is not frostbite and he knows it is not magic and he knows it is not some new, terrible virus wrought to give them ignoble deaths piled in their own fluids.

(The men won’t shut the fuck up.)

It’s because he is having a panic attack and cannot breathe.

Atticus, one of the infantrymen, presses a lit cigarette into his hand and gestures vaguely at him. Take it. They lack supplies and heat but they still have cigarettes, for some reason, maybe because only now did discipline die, replaced instead with animal instinct to just get through the moment.

Moment by moment, they become exactly what they’re trying to defeat.

Maybe his thoughts can be seen on his face, because Publius, on his other side, suddenly says, “It’s just a cigarette, man. It didn’t insult your—”

It didn’t insult your mother, goes the rest of that saying, and Publius wisely clicks his mouth shut before he finishes it — but it does make Jullus put the end of the thing in his mouth to avoid replying.

Tastes fucking bad, dry as the ash falling out of the sky, and when he breathes it in his body nearly bends itself in two from how badly his lungs reject the coarse smoke. He coughs horribly, raucously, and finds breathing a sharp, thin thing. The panic of real physical danger, however, seems to short circuit whatever chemical re-creation his body had decided to manufacture, and when he can finally breathe — when the men around him stop smirking — he realizes he hasn’t thought about his hands in a few minutes.

“I’m going on patrol,” Jullus announces, giving the cigarette back. It’s his turn soon, anyway, and lingering leads to chemical imbalance. “I’ll…try to find…more than this.”

The men watch him like he just announced he was diagnosed with a terminal illness — obliging of his earnestness, even though they know it will be the death of him.