Scrubbing the Walls of Chauvet Cave

> “It was in those days that the people made war upon each other, sister against sister, father against son. They fought for grain, for land, for promises made and broken. [...] Samel was the fiercest warrior amongst them, and he crushed those before him with the strength of his fist and the iron of his will.”

>

> -from ‘Fourth Song: The Reign of the Red King’

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The ground-to-space transport settled like an ungainly bird on a hardened dirt airfield on the surface of Tyx III. As the engine quieted, a group of Fleet officials, dressed in their finest uniforms, approached and stood waiting for the transport's doors to open. The ramp of the little ship lowered to the ground, and Aymon Sandreas, Voice of the Empire, stepped out into the hot air of the planet.

All the Fleet soldiers saluted as he walked down the ramp towards them. Aymon was followed by Kino directly behind him, and then at a more respectful distance, the rest of passengers of the transport. Halen was at the back of the group, casting a wary eye over everything.

"General Lang," Aymon greeted the woman at the front of the column of Fleet soldiers. "It's good to see you again."

He stuck out his hand to shake hers. She pulled him in and their shoulders bumped conspiratorially.

"I've missed seeing you, Aymon," Lang said.

Loan Lang was a sturdy woman with short black hair streaked with grey framing her broad, flat face. Her skin was browned and rough, but that was due to the omnipresent heat and blistering winds on Tyx III as much as anything. She was the same age as Aymon, in her mid fifties, but was as lively and strong as she had been when they were Academy students together.

"Is that you asking me to put you back on desk duty on Emerri? I could have that arranged," Aymon said.

"Not a chance," Lang said with a smile. "Is this your new apprentice?"

"One of them," Aymon said, and gestured for Kino to step forward. "This is Kino Mejia."

Lang shook Kino's hand as well. "Pleasure to meet you, Apprentice Mejia."

"The pleasure is mine, General Lang," Kino said, sounding rehearsed. She had managed to approximate a pleasant smile, which Aymon counted as a victory.

"Let's get out of this heat," Lang said. "I'm used to it, but I'm sure the two of you aren't."

"We're here on your hospitality," Aymon said. He swept his arm forward. "Lead the way."

Aymon followed Lang as she walked down the airfield towards an open air cart. One of the Fleet soldiers got in the driver’s seat, and Lang and Aymon got in the middle row, leaving Kino and Halen in the back. The soldiers who had accompanied Aymon to the planet were given duties and quarters by the soldiers who had been in Lang's party; they all dispersed to their own tasks as Lang and Aymon's cart drove across the airfield.

The place was dry, but not sandy, and the sun was massive in the sky, casting a horrible red glow over everything. Aymon considered the place barely hospitable.

"Is the weather like this all the time?" Kino asked from the back seat of the cart, her braids flapping in the wind as they drove.

"For about two thirds of the year," Lang said, talking loudly over the wind. "The rest of the time it's a torrential downpour. I prefer this weather."

"I find it hard to believe that this planet can sustain life," Aymon said. "It seems to be a miserable place."

"Oh, you get used to it quickly," Lang said. "And there's plenty of life. See those plants?"

She pointed out the cart to the opposite side of the airfield, which, being quite far away, didn't give much of a sense of scale for the plants she was indicating. They were tall enough to block the horizon in that direction, but none of the visitors had any sense of the scale of the planet’s horizon. The plants looked wider than they were tall, with a blueish canopy that bent all the way back to the ground in the direction of the prevailing wind.

"Weird," Kino said.

"They fill that wide part up with water when it rains, and store it for the rest of the year. Amazing adaptation. There's even more life underground," Lang explained.

"I do remember you mentioning something about underground caverns..." Aymon said with a smile.

"Polite of you to not call it 'rambling on and on' in my personal letters to you," Lang said.

"I'd rather have a personal letter from you than a hundred dry reports about the state of the front," Aymon said.

"Is that so? You've gotten sentimental in your old age," Lang said.

The cart bumped along, off the relatively smooth airfield and onto a well traversed dirt road leading toward a cluster of buildings. They were standard quick military construction, concrete walls half set into the ground, with sloping metal roofs to protect from the wind.

"Maybe I am sentimental," Aymon said. "But at least I'm not prone to writing long letters when I have better things to do."

"You wound me," Lang said.

Aymon could practically feel Halen rolling his eyes in the back seat.

"Well, here we are, home sweet home," Lang said, hopping out of the cart before it came to a complete stop. The rest of the group climbed out more sedately. Kino stumbled a bit upon exit; the gravity on this planet was more than what it was on Emerri.

The soldier at the door saluted their group and let them in to the front building. The entrance went down a few stairs, and the shelter provided a blessed relief from the whipping wind and hot, dry air outside. The light inside was much less harsh and red. As their group came through the door, various people who were working at desks caught sight of them, stood, and saluted. Lang waved them back down as she led Aymon, Kino, and Halen towards a door in the back.

From the main room aboveground, they walked down a well lit staircase into a long tunnel that was mostly formed out of the natural rock. The walls were slick and didn't look to be carved by blasting. A faint breeze brushed through the hall, ruffling Lang's hair and causing Aymon to shiver. The floors were poured concrete, rather than bare stone, presumably because walking on uneven floors would be quite annoying.

"You should have brought Yan here," Kino said, breaking their silence. "It's just like a ship."

"Yan?" Lang asked.

"One of my other apprentices, she's from a Guild family," Aymon explained.

"Where are you from, Apprentice Mejia?" Lang asked.

"Falmar," Kino said.

"Hm," Lang said noncommittally. Had she been on Falmar? Aymon didn't remember.

They passed the occasional soldier who scooted out of the way and saluted the group. Lang and Aymon gave nods back, Kino and Halen awkwardly trailed them. Kino was more awkward than Halen, who was used to this sort of thing.

"Is it secure to have your base built right into the tunnels?" Aymon asked. "Not that I'm doubting your judgement, of course."

"This area of the planet is well and truly cleared out," Lang said. "This whole place is separate from the main cave system in the area anyway."

"What's the breeze, then?" Halen asked, speaking up for the first time.

"Since we are cut off from the main caves, we have to ventilate this area ourselves," Lang said. "If you follow the breeze down, you'll find a big surface fan."

They eventually came to a door which Lang opened with a fingerprint scan. She held the door open for the group, and everyone entered her private office.

"Sorry that I don't have very much in the way of comfortable furniture, but pull up a chair," Lang said.

The office was fairly sparse, with a large, neatly organized desk taking up the bulk of the space. Along the oddly shaped walls of the room were wedged some filing cabinets, and screens monitoring various activities around the planet took up another good chunk of the wall real estate. There was another door on the other side of the room, but there were no hints as to where it led. The room was pleasantly lit, despite being underground.

Aymon and Kino took seats in the chairs in front of the desk. Halen stood in the back of the room.

"Care for anything to drink?" Lang asked.

"No, thank you," Aymon said. Kino shook her head no, following Aymon's lead.

"Your loss," Lang said, but she made no move to get anything to drink herself.

"So. How have things been on the front?" Aymon asked, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Permission to speak honestly?" Lang asked with a smile.

"Always granted," Aymon said. "In private, at least."

"It's more of a clusterfuck than anyone would like to admit. The surface has been completely cleared, but the damn caves have been a problem since day one, and it's only getting worse the further in we go."

"The seismic mapping hasn't been helping?" Aymon asked.

"The maps are not the problem. We know the whole terrain under there. The issue is one of logistics. It's impossible to send a field army through caves to fight people who are used to crawling through tiny holes like worms," Lang said.

"And chemical weapons haven't been useful because…?" Aymon asked, trailing off.

"You still have to get the damn things close enough to the people you're going to use ‘em on, and we can't do that. Not with drones, not with people. We can't block off the tunnel system and just flood in mass amounts because the whole planet is connected. Biological weapons would work, but..." Lang gave Kino a pointed glance.

"Absolutely not," Aymon said. "And you can't collapse the tunnels?"

"Like it or not, the tunnels are the best place to live on this planet, and it's hardly even worth settling if we bomb them into oblivion," Lang said.

"So it's a total standstill?" Aymon asked.

"We're making incremental progress, but at this rate it's going to be years of slow going before we're done."

"That's not really what I wanted to hear," Aymon said.

"In some sort of rush?" Lang asked.

"There's always demand for new planets," Aymon said. "And this one, for all its quirks, is habitable without a fifty year terraforming effort. That makes it a highly desired commodity."

"We'll get through it eventually," Lang said with a sigh. "Though I do worry that it will take the rest of my mortal life."

"The offer to get you reassigned to Emerri still stands," Aymon said.

"No, no..." Lang said. "There is something beautiful about this place that I would miss if I was back among the civilized."

Aymon raised his eyebrows.

"Did you know, every organism on this planet not brought by people is a clonal species? They never developed sexual reproduction. It's amazing, the way it's managed to diversify without that fundamental aspect of life."

"That's interesting in a theological sense, but not a practical one," Aymon said.

"Theology doesn't have much use when you're down on the ground," Lang said.

"Or in the tunnels," Aymon said.

"No, it has more use there," Lang said, sounding wistful.

"Regardless of the theological implications," Aymon said, "can you just describe to me the way you're going about this? Boots on the ground, how are you finding these people, how are you dealing with them?"

"Well, that's a long process, and every time it tends to go a little differently, but I'll tell you the way we try to plan things to go. We start out with assigning our sensitives to one per squad, obviously there aren't enough for every squad to have one, but we try to get them out to as many different areas of the planet as possible. They're the ones who can most effectively locate human life. So the sensitives scan as wide of an area as possible, and if there's a settlement located, that's when we send down drones to investigate. We have these ones that look just like some of the wildlife, so they're pretty stealthy, but they have a hard maximum on how much rock they can transmit through, so we have to inch them closer and deposit relay stations for the signal along the route."

"Sounds fairly typical so far," Aymon said. "Continue."

"Once we've confirmed the settlement, and know its precise location, the general population, and their habits, then we start to try to close the tunnels to prevent escape. That's usually where things get dicey," Lang said.

"How so?" Aymon asked.

"There are as many different ways for this to go wrong as there are settlements on this planet. The worst is when the group has their own sensitive- they can tell we're coming, obviously, and make life a real mess for us."

"Does that happen often?" Aymon asked.

"Well, groups with a sensitive are more likely to survive, so as we are able to destroy settlements without one, we concentrate down the survivors into the fittest groups. It's becoming more common."

"Makes sense," Aymon said.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Regardless, if we are able to collapse the tunnels enough to concentrate the whole group into one place, then, depending on the geometry of the problem, we send in our forces or attempt some alternate strategy."

"Geometry of the problem?" Aymon asked.

"Is it actually feasible to squeeze a fighting force through the remaining tunnels, will we have to bring boring equipment, those types of problems."

"And what are some of the alternate strategies?"

"If we think the tunnels are sealed off enough, we can try chemical weapons. They rarely are that sealed, though. If the population is concentrated enough, we can try to collapse the caverns on them. If we can get weaponized drones close enough, that's often the simplest and best solution."

"I'm not really seeing what the problem you're having is," Aymon said. "This all seems fairly effective. Certainly not anything that would require you to spend years and years more on this project."

"The population isn't just lying down and taking it, you know," Lang said, frustrated. "This campaign has been a war on a thousand fronts, and death by a thousand cuts. It's borderline impossible to pin them down, and meanwhile they're destroying tunnels that we use, killing any of our people that they find wandering, poisoning our water supplies, destroying our machinery... Anything and everything that a population under siege can do, they have done."

"And the entire power of the Fleet can't manage to take down a backwards group of tunnel dwelling primitives?" Aymon asked.

"I know, I know," Lang said. "It's a mess. And I'm telling you this to be honest with you, because I know it's going to take time."

"It's already taken too long. This is possibly the worst operation I've overseen in my tenure as Voice," Aymon said, frustrated.

Lang raised her eyebrows and gave a pointed glance at Kino.

Aymon sighed.

"Being unable to meet the demands for new planets is bad for the Empire, that's all I'm saying," Aymon said.

"And all I'm saying is that we are doing the best we can, and we're guaranteed to get the job done, it just will take some time. This planet is twice the size of Emerri, and we're fishing out rats from tunnels miles deep in the ground. If you think about the scale of the task, well, it's going about as well as anyone has any right to expect," Lang said.

"I have the right to expect that things will be done on schedule, so that I can make decisions for the future of the entire Empire," Aymon said.

There was a moment of intensely awkward silence. Lang looked frustrated, but held her tongue. Kino was sitting unusually still, but that was only because she was sitting on her hands. Halen sent Aymon a brief feeling of... something. The message was clear. Tone it down.

"I'm sorry, Loan," Aymon said. "I know that you're all working as hard on this as humanly possible."

"No, you're right, we underestimated the scale of the task. This is different than the typical land operation," Lang said.

"That it is," Aymon said. "I hate to ask, but internally, I know you and your team have your own estimates of how long this is going to take, can you give me the honest numbers?"

"Best case scenario for the actual fighting? Another three years. That's best case. But even after we get rid of the population, we're still going to have to go through every tunnel and scrub out every trace of people being here before us. Even with the best drones, the best image processing algorithms, that's a monumentally laborious task," Lang said.

"Aside from the caves, how is it any harder than any other cleanup operation?" Aymon asked.

"The caves are a big part of it, it's true. Hundreds of kilometers of honeycombed tunnels is already a daunting task. But the rest of it, well. You really have to see it to believe it."

Aymon raised an eyebrow. "I've seen some pictures."

"No, you have to SEE it," Lang said. "Want to do some spelunking?"

"Uh." Aymon hesitated. "Aren't we already?"

Lang laughed. "You should at least see where you're going to address the troops."

"We're not just doing that outside? Or in the hangar?"

"Oh, no. Can you imagine trying to talk over that wind? Miserable," Lang said.

"Well if you insist, then," Aymon said. "Now?"

"Sure, let's get you the official tour," Lang said, standing. Aymon and Kino also stood, their chairs scraping on the bare floor.

Lang headed out the door, and Aymon and Kino followed. As Aymon passed Halen, Halen raised an eyebrow. Aymon shrugged back, and Halen followed them out, behind Kino.

"Do you like caves, Apprentice Mejia?" Lang asked as they walked.

"I've never been in one," Kino said. "I don't know."

"You're in for a real treat, then," Lang said.

"I think you have caves on the brain," Aymon said.

"You're damn right I do," Lang said.

They followed Lang down a multitude of twisting corridors, some thin enough that they had to walk single file. Occasionally, they encountered a Fleet soldier going about their own tasks, who would have to back out of the tunnel to let their group pass.

"I imagine that it's quite annoying, if you're of lower rank and trying to navigate some of these passages," Aymon said, after they were out of hearing distance of the first soldier this happened to.

"I haven't personally experienced it, but I think that most of my subordinates are willing to suffer a little bit of indignity, and either squeeze past or climb over each other, if they're in a hurry," Lang said.

"Do you ever get people stuck in these?" Kino spoke up, tracing her fingers along the smooth walls.

"There will be mishaps in any operation, but most people have been here long enough that they become both good judges of what holes they can slip through, and also very adept at scrambling through tunnels. In the areas we use regularly it's almost never a problem, but when we send people out into the wider world, it can get dicey," Lang said.

"We're headed to some sort of auditorium space, you said? This doesn't exactly seem fire safe," Aymon said. "Evacuation wise, I mean."

"This isn't the main entrance to the auditorium, which is a bit wider. Still, you're not entirely wrong. If you've noticed, we do have fire doors all along every route, to stop it from spreading. The stone is not particularly flammable, so it hasn't been a major concern."

Aymon had to accept that. It still seemed like unsafe building practices to him, but since they were already going all in with using the natural tunnels of this planet as a base, there wasn't much that could be done to improve the safety of it at this point. Halen sent him a vaguely amused feeling, though that turned to frustration as he scraped his head on a particularly low outcropping in the ceiling.

The temperature dropped further as they headed down deeper into the caverns, but due to the humidity, Aymon developed a cold sweat. It was altogether unpleasant, and he was glad that he didn't have to stay on this miserable planet for more than a few days.

"We're almost there. We've actually been going underneath the main living quarters for most of the people stationed here. Just a little bit above us is our dining hall area..."

Aymon was forced to not focus on what Lang was saying for a little while. Her giving a tour of an area that they couldn't see and weren't going to visit was unenlightening at best. He directed his attention more on the tunnels barely wider or taller than his body, the increasingly uneven footing, and the limited visibility from artificial lights only strung up every few meters. Lang navigated with confidence, but Aymon struggled. He couldn't tell what Kino and Halen were doing behind him, but he assumed they were having just as bad of a time as he was. Halen was probably having a worse one, considering how large he was.

Thankfully, the tunnel widened out and brightened after a while. The lights weren't any closer together, but there was a strange glow on the walls that only became more pronounced as they walked.

"What is this?" Aymon asked.

"One of the native plants, it's quite handy. Really makes being down here much more pleasant," Lang said.

"And it glows because?" Aymon prompted.

"Obviously I'm not an expert, and even my experts haven't had enough time to study this planet's biology beyond a surface examination, but we hypothesize that it's because it attracts creatures to walk through and nest in the tunnels where it's growing. We know that it reproduces by spores, so if it can glow to attract them, they can carry the spores to other places in the caverns."

"What does it feed off of?" Aymon asked.

"At least partially it feeds off of minerals in the rocks and the moisture all around, but there's possibly a symbiotic component with the other creatures in here. We rarely find any, uh, droppings or corpses, so we suspect that the plants absorb them somehow. Like I said, I'm not an expert."

This was a wormhole that Aymon couldn't stop himself from going down. He was glad that he hadn't brought Yan, who was well versed in xenobiology, as she would probably be showing him up. Well, she probably wouldn't, but Aymon didn't enjoy feeling ignorant and wasn't feeling particularly charitable towards his absent apprentice. He couldn't help continuing to ask questions.

"If they do that, why are there plants growing on the walls and ceiling, wouldn't they only grow on the floor?" Aymon asked.

"If you look at it closely, there's tiny, tiny roots connecting all the plants. These walls are one big, connected organism. It probably even extends into adjacent caverns through cracks in the rock," Lang said.

"Hmm. And what do the animals eat?" Aymon asked.

"At this depth, most of the animals are at least partially surface dwelling. There's a lot of plants and things that grow up there. The deeper we get, the stranger the territory is. There's a whole food chain down deep that's got its roots in thermophilic little creatures that live in the hot water. It's... It's hard to describe theses things. We call them plants and animals, but they aren't, really, not in any traditional sense."

"And how deep are we going?" Aymon asked.

"Not much farther now."

They came to a final set of fire doors, and Lang leaned against them, facing the small group.

"You ready to see the cathedral?" She asked.

"Do we really need to be prepared?" Aymon asked, skeptical.

"I think it's pretty impressive," Lang said. She pushed open the doors and led them into the cavern.

It took a moment for Aymon's eyes to adjust to the sheer scale of the room. It was massive: several stories tall and wider than a city block. It was curved on all sides, including the bottom, and it was rather like standing on the inside of a balloon, the way it was shaped.

The size wasn't the impressive thing about the room, however. Carved into the walls and ceiling, though there wasn't much of a separation between the two, were channels in which the glowing plants had been cultivated. There were massive human figures depicted, dancing, or moving in some way, their hands held in the air, with swirling lines and stars coming up from them. They didn't look happy, exactly, but something deeper than that.

"Takes my breath away every time I come in here," Lang whispered.

Aymon had to agree. The room really was something to behold. It stirred something within him. Regret, maybe. He had taken up his duty as the Voice of the Empire, and it was his responsibility to see the wars of his predecessors through. He performed his duties with honor and conviction. But here, looking at this, it brought back feelings that he had long buried. There would always be a part of him that said 'if only, if only...'

"And all the caverns are like this?" He asked.

"Not all," Lang said. "But many."

Kino sat down on the steps that were carved into the floor, leading down to the bottom of the bowl. She rested her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, looking up at the vast figures above and around them.

"What does it mean?" Kino asked.

"I don't know," Lang said. "It might not mean anything."

Halen reached out and touched the carving closest to them, the leg of one of the dancing figures. Little flecks of the glowing plants came away in his hand. He looked at them for a second.

"And this all has to be destroyed?" Kino asked.

"Yes," Lang said with a sigh. "At least we get to appreciate it, for a little while longer."

----------------------------------------

Aymon had more important business to attend to than admiring forbidden art, so the rest of his day was spent in meetings with the board overseeing the whole operation, of which General Lang was only one member. The board comprised of Vice Admiral Kolruss, whose role in the operation was mainly to coordinate all the ships in orbit and was feeling rather put out about having such an unimportant position; General Lang, who was responsible for all on ground troop deployments; Commander Vale, who was the coordinator of all the scientific, technological, and terraforming operations on the planet; and Cantor Xu, who was the cultural leader, though it would be more accurate to call him an enforcer. They all had their own issues to address with Aymon, and they all brought their subordinates who had their own issues, and there were intergroup politics that showed the fraying patience everyone had for the whole operation. By the time that they broke for the night, Aymon had a raging headache, and realized that he hadn't eaten all day.

One of the Fleet soldiers directed him to where his temporary residence was, and Kino to hers, a little further down the hall. It was a small room, with a bed, a desk, a chair, a closet with drawers, and an adjoining bathroom, but that was about it. Though it was a far cry from the accommodations Aymon usually had, he supposed it was about as good of a residence as anyone else on the base had. Halen, though he had his own room, was with him.

Now in private, Aymon felt free to release some of his frustrations. He sat down on the bed, changed his mind, stood back up, took off his cassock and shoes, tossed them in the general direction of the chair, then flopped back down on the bed.

"Are you done?" Halen asked, picking up the cassock and draping it over the back of the chair.

"God, my head hurts," Aymon said. He used the power to flip off the light switch, plunging the room into a semi darkness. "Damn this glowing stuff."

The glowing stuff was indeed growing in patches over the ceiling of the room. It wasn't overly bright, but it wasn't the darkness that he had hoped for.

Halen shoved Aymon's legs towards the back of the bed and sat down on the edge.

"Don't be such a baby," Halen said.

"I don't like this place," Aymon said.

"Why should you? It has all the ingredients for a miserable nightmare." Halen ticked off the reasons on his fingers. "Tight, dark, enclosed spaces; people lurking somewhere in the dark desperately trying to kill you; creepy glowing organisms; weird cave art; complicated relationships from your childhood; long, boring meetings with people who want to complain to you about problems you don't have any direct control over; endless delays to a schedule. It's a perfect mess of a place."

Aymon laughed, then winced. His head really did hurt.

"Someone's bringing dinner in a few minutes," Halen said. "I did you the favor of glaring at General Lang when she thought too hard about inviting you to dinner with her."

"Thanks," Aymon said. "How could you tell she was going to do that?"

"I was standing behind her when she texted her aide during a break in the meeting. She was asking the chef to make something nice," Halen said. "And she had this awful feeling of anticipation."

"God, of course she did," Aymon said.

"What is the deal with her, anyway?" Halen asked.

"You jealous?" Aymon asked, teasing.

"No, you idiot," Halen said, swatting at Aymon's leg that was kneeing him in the back. "Why, is she...?"

"We used to be friends at the Academy, sort of. I don't really know what we were to each other. For the last few years we had this... thing... where we would dare each other to do crazier and crazier things. Looking back on it, it was pretty destructive, but we had a good time, I guess. We competed to outdo each other at almost everything. And after I got my apprenticeship she was pretty mad at me. I don't know. She's changed a lot since then," Aymon said, rambling.

"You have, too, I'm sure," Halen said.

"Yeah. I have." Aymon didn't say anything else.

Halen laid a cool hand on Aymon's forehead.

"May I?" Halen asked.

Aymon reached up to touch Halen's hand. Aymon couldn't quite see Halen's face in the darkness.

"Of course," Aymon said.

Aymon felt the moment that Halen's power passed into his body, forcing his muscles to relax, and dulling the pain behind his eyes. It was a violation of the self to use the power on another person's body, which made it much more difficult, but Halen had plenty of practice. Halen was good at it.

"You're dehydrated," Halen said.

"Tell me something I don't know."

Halen stroked Aymon's hair for a moment before withdrawing his hand. "Dinner's here," Halen said. "Close your eyes so I can turn on the lights."

Aymon obeyed. As he lay there with his eyes closed, he felt Halen get up from the bed, and heard the knock on the door, the door open, and a brief exchange as Halen accepted the food. For the millionth time, Aymon was so grateful to Halen for the seemingly effortless way he took care of him.

"Here, drink up," Halen said, passing Aymon a bottle of water that had apparently come in with their dinner.

Aymon sat up and opened his eyes slowly, trying not to wince as the light hit his residual headache. He obediently drank the water.

"What's for dinner?" Aymon asked.

Halen examined the trays. "Uh, looks like roasted vegetables and vat meat."

"Guess that's what we get for not having a fancy dinner with the General," Aymon said.

"Hey, beggars can't be choosers," Halen said, passing a meal to Aymon.

Halen sat on the chair backwards, balancing the tray on the back of it as he ate. They were both quiet for a few minutes.

"Thank you for being so patient with this," Aymon said after he had eaten a decent portion of his meal and was feeling almost fully human again.

"With what?" Halen asked.

"This trip specifically, but everything in general. I put you through a lot," Aymon said. "Just. Thank you."

"You know I do it because I love you," Halen said.

"You don't have a lot of choice."

"I have more than you think," Halen said. "And I choose, every day, to be with you."

"I just... I worry that I don't give you everything that you give me," Aymon said.

"Is that what this is about? God, Aymon," Halen smiled at him. "You've given me the universe."

"Is that the same thing as care and love?" Aymon asked.

"Are you saying you don't think you love me enough?"

"I don't know what I'm saying, at this point. Ignore me," Aymon said, shaking his head as if to clear it.

Halen just looked at him with his soft eyes. Aymon couldn't help but love him. Despite everything, Halen loved him, and cared for him, and was kind and gentle and patient and... It was despite everything, and in spite of everything, and because of everything that had happened in the thirty years they had known each other.

"I do love you, Halen," Aymon said. "I just-"

"I know," Halen said. "I know."

Halen put his tray down on the desk and stood up, coming to sit next to Aymon on the bed. Aymon put his own tray down on the floor and wrapped his arms around Halen's shoulders.

"I've known you loved me before you figured that out yourself," Halen whispered. "And I know how much you love me now, and how much you love me every day. You don't need to tell me."

Halen leaned into his touch, and Aymon felt Halen's heavy hands at his waist. By mutual agreement, they brought their faces together and kissed.

And maybe it was alright, if Aymon was only there to take, and take, and take. Because Halen was so willing to give, and give, and give.