2120 - Noise and nerves - Another Ossan - The sound of the sea - Deployment - Four propellers - Snake eyes - Fight or flight - Call and response - Alphabet soup - Candy - A new friend.
Mom, they're sending me to Ossa tomorrow, Eoran Toriet's letter began. He sat hunched over a low table that spread long to either side of him, left hand compiling his thoughts in a flurry of slapdash penmanship scrawled onto the sloppy and warped pages of a notebook that had seen much better days. Just beyond him lingered an empty aluminum tray, each partition picked clean save a pair of seed-laden, wheat-based rectangles. For convenience sake, most people called them crackers, but all soldiers knew the truth behind that delusive designation: they were reformed sawdust masquerading as food.
The chow hall long ago descended into auditory chaos. Two companies of freshly-trained recruits from opposite ends of the country were assembled and allowed to mingle therein. Soldiers stripped to their shirts hooted loudly amongst one another; tables were slapped in jovial recollection of hardships they’d faced at home, furtive glances belying any stoicism these young men boasted of the yet-to-be hardships they would face in the field. Bodies were up and down, around and about, a constant fluctuation of ungoverned curiosity.
Eoran, however, kept close to the mates he’d acquired in basic. Despite their brief camaraderie, he knew this large gathering was due to be chopped up and shipped out. It was pointless to get to know anyone he may never see again—perhaps this was a passive way of divesting himself of unnecessary emotional baggage. Besides, he clearly had more important things to do.
Too bad some in his class had different opinions on that latter point.
"Eo—hey, Eo! How do you say 'FUCK YOU' again?" The loudest private in his squad shouted loud enough to fill the hall, even though he was sitting right in front of the occupied boy.
"Aatoya—"
"AATOYA," the rambunctious soldier repeated, shoving his friend next to him with a large fist. "How do you say 'FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKIN’ FUCK'?"
"Uh—what? What about 'fuck you' isn't good enough? It's concise, gets the point across..." Eoran looked up from his letter to the bright blue eyes of the blond boy perched expectantly in his queries. Eo was a complete contrast; dark hair, dark eyes, demure in the face of such self-possessed bombast, furrowed brow conveying a small measure of irritation.
"I wanna get poetic with it. Remember when Instructor Carle said you people are all about the poetry of shit? I gotta to show off my eloquence, really blow 'em away. Look, if you won't tell me, I'll just go ask that Ossan guy from the other camp."
Eoran’s eyes lit up instantly, apparently not as committed to his correspondence as his studious façade portrayed. He glanced aside, surreptitiously searching the sea of faces draped in blue-light fluorescents. “There’s another Ossan?!”
The private’s thumb gestured behind him and Eoran tilted his head to the side.
“I don’t see him—which one?”
“Black hair,” the white boy turned, “There, right there—see? Three rows down, back to us, to the left.”
“Oh.” With a grin, Eoran shut his notebook and stood. “I’m going to go say hey.”
He was only a handful steps in before a loud sergeant entered the room and announced, with an open throat shout, that chow time was over. The Toriet boy’s sigh fell on deaf ears, soon devoured by a horde of boys rushing to claim their beds.
Reveille woke everyone early the following day.
Camp Holltin was built on the south eastern side of Amstead’s landmass. Situated near the ocean, it drew a salt-touched breeze from the nearby water, especially in the hours marking the beginnings of a new day. The sun had yet to peek over the squat buildings lining the camp’s far side, but it lingered just above the horizon. Streaks of red clouds emanated from a center unseen, a neon-rimmed burst of lines broke the lavender tranquility of morning’s first breaths with their grasping fire fingers. Just below, row upon row of colorless barracks stood in an order that would never be disrupted—not unless peace somehow came between Amstead and Ossa’s quarrelling, which seemed increasingly unlikely given the repetitious marching of every passing day. Again, the shuffling of boots on gravel clashed with the meditative hum of the crashing sea.
With his haversack slung over his shoulder and still partially asleep, the Toriet boy fell in line within his company. Their CO wove through the collective lines of the group and picked them apart, directing each soldier to go one of two ways, either:
Left, where a convoy of trucks were idling. Or…
Right, where a hulking turboprop waited at the head of a paved runway.
Like a zipper ripped open, Eoran’s squad split apart. He moved towards the plane, watching with a rousing fascination how the flight crew scurried around the structure, scale reduced to the size of ants turned frenzied. Their black shadows were brisk, quickly fussing and passing around the machine in preparatory ballet, choreographed motions beholden to the wisps of pull-tags demanding removal before each departure. Four propellers lazily spun in the morning air before committing to their spinning in earnest. Now there was no calming rush of the sea—only the sound of antiquated engineering proved too reliable to decommission.
When Eoran stepped into the belly of the idle beast, he felt the hum of its engines in his spine. The plane’s interior was dark—no windows save for the one in the center of the exit, situated like it was built to be bailed from. The cabin was long and sparse, inner joists bare, industrial and bereft the luxury of bubbly fabrics seen in civilian transport. Seats were more like benches: long and littered with straps. The young private fit himself into the first space he saw, clutched his pack to his chest, and glanced aside. The soldier at his writing elbow had hair the color of autumn, like foliage burnt by the will of a quickly changing season. He turned his chin to check the other side, quickly absorbed in the sea of similarly young faces filtering in from the daylight. Eoran's eyes were always full of night, wide in the darkness of their confinement as they shifted over details blurred by constant motion.
When the next group began to file in, PFC Toriet's query from the night prior was the first man aboard.
He was tall with a head-down-low posture echoing more a predator's desire to remain hidden than the habit of a shy thing, more measured than callow. Eoran's squadmate had been right, to some degree: the boy in question was mixed. His features were brackish between duelling landscapes, cheekbones high as Ossa's jagged terrain, nose sharper and more pronounced like the boys surrounding them, eyes wider than typical but shaped enough like a foreigner's that their color didn't matter when lines were drawn, gaze like gunmetal and ashes rather than the more familiar onyx and deep mahogany that Ossa took great pride in.
The darker the hollow, the deeper the well, the Toriet patriarch had proudly proclaimed of his sons time and time again.
The deeper the well, the harder to get rid of the snakes, Eoran's mother had always added, constantly patrolling the outlands of her husband's old blood philosophy to make sure her children knew sense and not just principle.
That unnerving boy and his lightning bottle energy paused when he breached the fuselage, just long enough to skim across each face,
long enough to pause on Eoran,
brief enough to keep from lingering.
The stranger passed brisk through the gangway and went straight to the back of the plane, hand carding through his black hair to rub at his freshly sheared undercut. As far as he could get from those already seated, the pale-eyed boy and his mongoose cast, glowering gaze ever averted, took a seat with his back to the sturdy wall of the hold, pack between his feet, counting out energy bars like the holy currency of the food-insecure.
Idle reverie broken by the sudden reminder escaping him, Eoran leaned forward on his pack, smooshing it atop his thighs. His gaze was always guided by his curiosity’s whim, and his curiosity only had eyes for the soldier that just passed him by. For an extended moment, he studied that boy from afar, watched the shadow-draped shape of him work through his calorie counting arithmetic. He was on the edge of his seat when a specter of perception gave his impatience pause. What was that—hostility? A sense of innate antipathy? That boy’s scowl clearly worked wonders in building walls. A zone of exclusion afforded him a wide berth in a space that was rapidly becoming cramped.
Watching, waiting, Eoran was scopaesthesia made real. He willed himself to be caught, wearing a smile to be found in a profusion of apathy.
That feral thing knew what it was to be watched.
Much the opposite of a domesticated creature’s impulse to seek the source of their peripheral dysphoria, the boy in question fell completely still. Slowly, carefully, like even now he was in danger of being trenchant caught, he stowed the bars in his bag. Folded in twain, he idly cast his grey eyes askance and upward, caught his captor by the throat with his noose stare, straight line mouth a piano-wire snare before the trapping pit.
He was two reflections of fight-or-flight in a foxhole. His eyes narrowed, just barely, twitch like a question mark.
Eoran’s sense of adventure double-crossed a pang of anxiety that rang through his guts like a scolding from his mother, another ignored lesson on how he shouldn’t be so open to courting all signs of blatant danger. He motioned to the boy with his hand, a fluid language of his own making compiled in a series of gestures. Index finger to his chest identified the subject of the sentence; turning it upon the stranger posited his request: Can I sit with you?
The raffish boy's deadfall expression didn't falter, stock still position unmoving despite the chaos of boarding surrounding him.
"Hey," a larger PFC intoned, friendly as he broke the mudblood's predator-prey standoff with the Ossan boy across the plane. Rubbing at his close cropped auburn hair, the soldier attempted to sit. "I'm Bergen—Cole B—"
The larger recruit's descent was halted by that lone delinquent's hand planted on his back, shoving him off to the next row across.
"No." His decree was absolute. "Seat's taken." He still held Eoran's querying stare,
eyes wide and dark,
so wide in the dark,
when he spoke, loud enough to be heard across the din. The standoffish soldier crossed his arms over his chest as he sat back, sullen and unamused. He looked up sharply at the redhead sent stumbling over apologies as he found himself a seat a couple rows away, ears red and cheeks flushed in rejection.
The boyish hope illuminating Eo’s expression grew into a victor’s satisfaction in seeing the question answered and his invitation extended. The young private stood and moved through the settling crowd, stepping past the shunned white boy with no acknowledgement of his personal victory whatsoever.
“Hey,” he said to the mixed stranger, sitting close enough to be heard without having to yell. He fashioned himself into a more jovial reflection of the other boy, wedging his bag between the bench and the dust-blown floor. “I’m Eoran. Thanks for letting me sit with you.”
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"Okay," the loner replied, a short drawl through something of a mumble like the word was sticky. His smirk was tucked into his cheek where no one could see, head pressed back into the fuselage. He spoke at a volume that drew people closer but he wasn't conscious of this behavior—instead, he canted his head to listlessly examine his companion from his tall angle, inadvertent superiority scrawled all over his pretty face.
His antagonistic demeanor seemed all too willing to withhold his name, to torch this offer of friendship and leave it gawking at a seat left empty by a ghost, but something seemed to hold that juvenile delinquent fast.
"I'mma ask you something."
It was a statement of intent, not a request for permission.
That gregarious boy tilted his head, inquisitive stare augmenting his already receptive disposition. If the other boy was telling, then, just like that, the young PFC considered himself told.
And yet—there it was again. A feeling that put him on the edge of his seat. Eoran warned himself that this was the type of conversation had on the eve of a stabbing, his et tus nameless, his curiosity slain. Like witnessing the timeslown, unstoppable moments before his own death, Eo couldn’t look away. He couldn’t stop himself from quirking his brow just so,
ready and
waiting and
wanting—even in his red-flag captivation.
“Okay,” he replied, easy.
The flight risk next to Eoran crossed his legs loosely, heel bouncing on the aluminum floor.
"If you had the chance, in this exact moment, to go back to the life you were living before—your friends, your family, the things and people you love—would you take it?" Feral thing incapable of amicable eye contact kept his straightaway looks to himself, observing the other PFC in sidelong, obtuse degrees and skewed glimpses. He seemed nervous, undecided, ready to spring but suddenly snared. "Whatever you get out of the army, money, job stuff, you get it. Would you dip, right now?"
Eoran briefly thought on the question, then shook his head. “No.”
He leaned back, but his torso remained turned toward the unfamiliar boy. In the stuttered space of all his glancing, Eo was resilient, tempting eye contact from the stranger’s strident flickering.
“Do I get to know your name now?”
"No. You get parts. Starts with a K," the boy replied before briskly continuing, almost without space enough for breath. "Why do you even want to be here. I mean do you want to be here or do you have to be here—cause it's different."
The boy whose name started with a K flickered less, strayed less.
“I chose to be here, but don’t want to be here. I just wouldn’t leave right now,” Eoran replied. “It’s not that I like being in the army—shit sucks, for real. I hate all the running and being yelled at, and how all these guys think saying ‘you people’ is a sympathetic way of addressing someone who looks different but was born in Amstead just like them... But it’s not much better in Port Haven, is it? I want to see the Ossa my parents rant and rave about. I think this is the only chance I’ll ever get. I’m tempting Varonian with my life no matter the angle, right? Die out here a traitor to my heritage or like a dog in the streets of Holm. What does it matter either way?”
"A," the interrogator offered in reward, setting a precedent for the rules of their impromptu game. "If you die either way, wouldn't you want to be with your crew—your family, whatever—rather than a plane full of people you don't give a fuck about?"
“Oh, so either the plane crashes or trenchants eradicate my entire bloodline in one fell swoop?” The Toriet boy pulled a face as the circumstances of each option grew clearer, features contorted by a strain of disbelief. “Who are you to say I don’t give a fuck about the people on this plane—that guy over there and his friend right beside him; Poole, four heads down,” Eo indicated with a quick flick of his fingers. “You, and the guy you ushered off...”
"Fuck that guy—I don't know him. Don't want to. S'why I'm talking to you," he scoffed indignant, like this topic, these other people were irrelevant. Eoran didn't earn a letter this time: he didn't answer the question. But maybe the fault laid with the interviewer.
"I have a friend who's alone without me and I don't want to be here—but it's sort of her fault I'm out here at all. Tryna figure out if I really want to get out and find my way back home or if I should stay here and keep having this conversation with you."
Surely that stray boy was discussing a longer timeline with the language of immediacy.
His eyes, though: they lingered. Quicksilver alleycat and his mercurial attention span was curious now, pressed by the holes being poked through the backdrop of his thought experiment, the tangential admission of a bloodline with a reason to be afraid of trenchants.
Eoran drew his line of sight away from his companion. He turned to carefully observe the rest of their compatriots to gauge interest—did they care that these two Ossan-looking kids were having a conversation? Was anyone actively listening? Finding nothing immediately alarming had him switching back, but the young private leaned closer in his return. Proximity was a product of confidentiality. Amiability was a surface-level front devoured by the sudden gravity of their conversation.
"Are you serious? You think you're going to have a home to go back to if you desert the army? This machine runs on blood, they'll get it either way." The depth of Eoran's mineshaft stare was so austere; he was endless, impenetrable, empty. "Look, I don't know shit about you and I'm only kinda into the pressure of this 'be interesting or I'm out' game of hypotheticals you've got going on, but I'd hate to get the rest of your name from a newspaper article going off about how people that look like you and me are just traitors to their country."
The Toriet boy straightened and receded slightly. "Last night, when I heard there was another Ossan, I was so excited to meet you. I wanted to get deployed with you, I wanted to sit here. Does that sound weird? Whatever, just—maybe I'm misunderstanding what's actually happening here, but I don't want to be part of whatever scales you're stacking in weighing your options. It's not my place to convince you, so if you want to keep talking, I'm here. I can wait around, or I can fuck off. You looked really alone. Maybe that was my fault for assuming."
That boy, so ready to flee the forest fire threatening their perimeter, seemed to settle down, hands finally leaving the hand loops of his Amstead issued pack.
He leaned in too close, like he didn't know how to properly escalate proximity between strangers, to catch the vortex of Eoran's eyes, to find himself submitting to the whorl of that endless stare.
"I was alone ‘cause I wanted to be," he offered succinctly with a lopsided grin, equal parts osprey and yearling. "Now I'm not. You act like I could go someplace right this second." The low-raised thing laid his arm out behind Eo, along the edge of the bench's low back, his grey eyed observation now prolonged. "S. Two of them."
"You talk like you're going to. I'm just trying to keep up." Eo offered in response, shoulders falling in tandem with a breath exhaled. He was slipping in the silver of the caged thing's gaze, hangman tempted by his letterbox lure. "How many more pieces are there?"
"One," the boy responded like a preparatory breath. Rummaging through his pocket, the wilder of the pair pulled out a roll of hard candies, with a look on his face that said I definitely stole these from commissary.
He pressed a paper wrapped sweet into the other boy's hand—giving, not offering, not waiting for him to accept. "You scared of breaking the rules? You act like they got a hook in you. Afraid of letting people hear."
"Yeah, they do have a hook in me. I need to get paid, my family needs the money.” Eyes affixed in his enduring observation, Eoran’s head tilted again. “Trust is tricky, right? I'm going into warzone alongside these guys, I don't want to give them any reason to doubt me. I'm just like them—skin and bones, blood and guts. But I look like the enemy, I speak their language... so I need to be careful.”
The Ossan boy's fingers were wrapped around the piece only as long as it took him to dump the thing back into the other private's lap. His returned glare deemed the placation unacceptable, but his body language assured that he could dance around the issue indefinitely. “I don't want candy. I want that letter.”
"It's not candy or letter, they're independent things—you can have candy and letter, fucking one-track Eo-Ra-N, always on that objective, huh," K-A-S-S- fired back, the rowdy Ossan in his blood shooting off as he grabbed Eoran by the wrist and wrapped Eoran's fingers around the contentious sweet. He pushed the whole package back at the boy, settling back into the corner so he could watch him more keenly, popping one of the fruit candies into his mouth. "And I get it. Of course I do. I just know no one's listening to us. They don't wanna get involved with a street kid and a foreigner. They think we're talking in words they can't understand about shit they don't wanna get involved in. Too worried about looking racist to listen too close-like. Yet. It'll change when we're out there."
Cheeks hollowed out from sucking on the cheap confection, the boy tilted his head, an unspoken, particularly shitty know-it-all proclamation of You know I'm right clear despite the rising cacophony of excited soldiers.
Still, Eoran was radiant in his fuck you, pay me recoil, his blistering desire unsated, his understanding of the rules established between them suddenly unsure, his answer unrewarded. He kept the sweet but was doubly scorned. That boy’s frustration traced his features in embers, a conflagration stoked by his measured breath, smothered in the rise and fall of his chest.
"If I can have candy and the letter, then why do I
only
have
f u c k i n g
candy?
Quit stalling," he lamented, sulking glance turned aside, "I'm never going to get to know you if my answers aren't even worth a letter anymore."
"Why do you need a name to know me?" The question was stark, callow in a manner absent from his prior string of conversation. "You see me, you've touched me, we've argued already—am I meaningless if you don't know my name?"
"No, but how am I supposed to get your attention if I don't have something to call you? How are you supposed to acknowledge me if you don't know I’m talking to you? When I shout 'hey' across a base or out in the field, how will you know it's meant for you?" Eo looked back, bare and forthright. “How can you touch me but not want me to know your name?”
"Those are some long term plans you got." A wry observation escaped that enigma of a boy as he leaned into his elbows, thoughtful. The boarding process was almost complete and already the engines were cutting back the range of intelligible conversation. He leaned closer, somewhere between reward and requisite, hand on his new friend's neck when he gave Eoran his hard won bounty.
"E."
"Kasse," Eoran tried, testing the syllable on his tongue—the taut K, the lingering double S. He was pretty sure he was only thinking as far ahead as the day would take them, but maybe that was a long time for some: people who counted energy bars, who wanted to be alone and wanted to escape. Focus drawn to his lap, the boy fussed with the sweets, smile evidencing the satisfaction taken in receiving his prize of a vowel. "Thanks for the candy, I actually really like these."
"They're the best thing in the commissary," Kasse replied as he split the roll in two, handing half of it over—waiting for it to be accepted this time. "S'why they keep them on the shelves behind the register—it's the good shit."
Maybe it didn't seem like a lot, didn't seem important, didn't seem like much of a gift to boys who came from homes, came from houses, came from parents, from schools and some vague expectation of safety, but Kasse offered the sweets as a bond. This was a promise.
Five letters and half a roll of sugared pastilles was his stray dog oath to remain, to always lead his tamed friend out of the wilderness the same way they went in:
together.
"I wasn't really gonna go anywhere," the mixed boy lied as he shoved a candy into his face. "I was just fucking with you."
“Hmm, okay.” Eoran accepted the words like he accepted the promise, with open mind and open hand. He tucked the sweets away for later, slipping them into the long, flat pocket atop his chest, his heart just beneath all those layers of scratchy camouflage and drab cotton underthings. For reasons unsaid, he felt the need to keep them close—easily accessible for when he wanted them most. Eo seemed fine to let the significance of Kasse’s gesture stand in the wordless shifting of his lithe limbs.
“You can call me Eo, by the way. Most people do instead of saying my name in full.” As the growing roar of the four massive propellers hacked and slashed at the air beyond the riveted sheets of dinged cowling, the Toriet boy drew himself close enough to leave his words in his friend’s ear. “Was that the only thing you were fucking with me about?”
"Iunno," the boy hummed in taunting satisfaction, side-eyed graceful, tucking the candy into his cheek as he strapped in. His fate was decided. He was in this shit now. "I fuck around a lot."
Eoran smiled. Ever delayed by his own proclivities, the boy was just starting to situate himself face forward when a superior began their final walkthrough. The PFC made quick work of the machine’s strange system of restraints, however, and was ready when those boots finally crossed his line of sight.
The Ossan boy settled back for the long, loud ride both glad to have made a new friend, and nervous about where the coming hours and days would take him. He was quiet and present, observant eyes making record of all moments passing in flashes of light from that lone window—the way Kasse looked in sun and shadow, how the light draped upon him, traced him sweeping strokes lent from breaks between thick patches of cloud cover.
At first, Eoran’s glances at Kasse were frequent, witnessing that boy, reaffirming their overlap. Later he would learn to relax. Eoran would grow more skilled at being surreptitious, quicker, efficient, unobtrusive, but he was always after the same thing: to make sure Kasse was still there. To make sure Kasse was not a ghost.