Liam
Shinchaw, the evening we got back. That damn skyscraper was still burning. I snorted. We ripped that thing two days ago. What was left to burn in there? I entertained myself by musing on the possibilities.
I was waiting for Aki to finish cleaning up and come outside. I was not sure why I had followed him. Well, I usually followed him, so it seemed normal. I was not sure he knew I was waiting. He’d been oblivious ever since we got back to the FOB. I stared at the sky, tracing the stars, taking a break from myself. I was so deep in the void that I never heard the shower turn off. I never heard the door open or shut. I never noticed him approaching. The motion sensor caught, and the overhead spotlight illuminated him when he was nearly on top of me. I found myself pressed against the sheet metal wall, pinned by his arm. He was clean, now, no trace of the blood and soot that had covered him only a few minutes before. His hair was dripping, his undershirt damp. He had not even dried off.
He was yelling. The first he had spoken since dismount. Aki, yelling? He shoved again. The sheet metal creaked. I could not register his words, only the fury. I had never seen him like this. I twisted out from under his arm, and turned my back to him. I fumbled in my pocket. As I pulled my cigarette case out, Aki grabbed it, and dashed it to the ground. The case snapped open, and my carefully hand rolled cigarettes tumbled to the dust.
“Those are expensive,” I complained. I bent to retrieve them.
“Stand up, Liam,” he hissed, the words a whip crack. I straightened. He shoved me back again, one hand pressing my shoulder onto a bolt. I hid my wince. Motes of grit and ash glittered between us in the flickering light. Pretty. I refocused on his sunken eyes, his bloodless face. His sharp angles were lined with sharper shadows. He had never turned such eyes on me before. We stood in silence. The spotlight turned off.
“Don’t you know what you’ve done?” Aki spoke into the black. I said nothing. The pressure on my shoulder disappeared. The light snapped on. He had stepped back, turned aside. His clenched fist was pressed to his mouth. His eyes stared into nothing, unblinking. He heaved a few heavy breaths. Then he was back at me, fingers jabbing into my chest.
“All I have ever done is look after you. Kept you out of trouble.”
My blood ran as icy as his stare.
“All this time, keeping you out of an early grave. Saving you.” His voice broke in a laugh. “And now I’m as sick as you.” He spun away, throwing his hands in the air. He paced. Away, back toward me, then away again.
“You think so low of me?” I asked, at length. I sounded pathetic. Aki rounded on me. In moments his face was close to mine. His lip curled.
“Yes, Liam, I do.” Aki said. He turned away, breathing heavily. When he looked back at me, his face was another man’s. “I tried to help you. To make you not like this.” He eyed me up and down.
“Like what?” I could hear a little boy in my own voice. I hoped he did not. Aki looked away. I gathered myself, and pressed. “Like what, Aki? Just say it.”
“A wild animal! A Throwback!” Aki yelled. “You’ve killed your own blood, for Torch’s sake! No wonder they created the Standard, just look at what free breeding makes!” He flipped his hand at me.
My mind blanked. A void. Then a conflagration. Glass exploding toward me. Cigarette burns. A protruding eyeball in a deformed skull, bleeding from ravaged cracks into the horse shit and the expensive pine shavings and the blood dripping from the hammer in my hand and there were screams from inside the house but not many and not for long and there was a smoking hole in the charred chestnut coat that leaked not just blood but something else and there was a sound as I hugged the still warm body and there was a chunk of pink on the wood planks of the stall and the man at my feet was groaning and the pupil of his twisted eye was spasming until I made it stop burning me with cigarettes forever.
I snapped back to the present, unclenched my hand from the non-present hammer. Aki froze. I gave him no opportunity to backpedal.
“You’ve always resented me,” the epiphany struck me at the same time my words hit the air. “You were alone. So you claimed me to keep you company.” Somehow, my voice was calm. Empty.
He swallowed. His eyes glistened. “No. Lee. You made me kill her.”
The growing fire inside me screeched. My voice was still calm.
“I never make you do anything,” I said. He was the one who always told me what to do, when to do it, how to behave. My foundation gave way, crumbling to cinders from the inside out. I stepped close. I stood tall, rather than slouching before him. I looked down at him for once. I loomed close, and I let my rage speak the way he never permitted. “You’re a soldier, just like you always wanted.” I snorted. “You’ve been blaming me for years, but you’re the one who can’t handle the life you chose. This is you.”
I touched my knuckles to his heart as I spoke the last into his face.
“And you hate how much you like it.”
A few seconds passed before I discovered I had dropped to one knee. My palm was in the dirt. I could taste blood. Keep calm, assess. I tried to reason out why my head was ringing. Falling debris? No, the FOB was in a leveled part of the city. There had been a flash, then pain. Aki had just hit me so hard I forgot what he could possibly have hit me for. What had I done? For him to hit me, it must have been too awful for words. Had his confession not been enough to punish me?
For the first time since I was six years old, watching my home become the flames that erupted from its heart, I did not try to stop my tears. I did not understand why, but I knew this was all wrong. What he had done was wrong.
I looked up at him. His fist was raised, poised for peak potential. He’d planned another blow. I don’t know what he saw, but he stepped back. I shook my head a little to clear the fog. He started to come to me, stooping, mumbling something gentle that I could not hear. He reached for me with the same hand that had struck me. I twisted away from his touch. A low, inarticulate sound. I thought it came from him.
I wiped blood from my lip. I looked at the gleaming wet on my fingers.
“All you have ever done is hold me down. What I am – whoever I am – it was never good enough for you,” I said.
All at once, the weight slid off of me. I stood, feeling a deep, delirious grace.
“Liam -” he began. He sought my hand. I yanked it away. He cursed, coming toward me again. He tried to corral me. “Wait. Listen to me. Please, listen. Look at me, Lee. Don’t go.” He grabbed for me as I started to turn. I looked at his hand on my wrist, then into his face. His eyes were red, deep in their sockets. He’d had those circles under his eyes for weeks, almost as dark as his tattoos. But we all had those. He had not earned any special dispensation to act out.
“You know I’d never strike you?” I asked.
“Yes. I know. I’m sorry.”
“You’re finally seeing what you did.” I felt the corner of my mouth twitch. “It took four campaigns. Roasting civvies in a cave from a distance, all in a day’s work. But one ‘Surge you actually had to look in the eyes?” I bent over and plucked a dirty cigarette from the ground. I fished my lighter out of my pocket. I took a long drag, and I didn’t try to avoid him with my smoke.
“And me. Do you ever think about what my life would be, if you hadn’t put a collar on me?”
The more I spoke, the more he seemed to shrink before me. Within the hollowed hull that war had made of him, I could still see a boy of seven who had once transfixed me with that same beseeching stare. I had never criticized him like this. No – I had never stood up for myself like this.
“You fucking martyr,” I said. I took a deep drag, then flicked the cigarette into the abyss.
The spotlight switched off.
“I would not have chosen this life, Aki. But I chose you. You were worth that and so much more.”
“Liam -” his voice broke. He stepped toward me. The light switched on. He was reaching for me. Tears were running down both our cheeks. “Please, I’m sorry. Come here, I’m just confused. You’re right, it wasn’t you. I did it myself. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to live with it. I don’t know how to live with how much I wanted to do it. Please, Lee, I’m lost.” His fingers slid around my hand. I pulled it away from him, slowly, automatically. He groaned. A sound almost like when I’d caved Uncle Radgett’s skull in. I rejected the association immediately.
I wanted to go to him. Gods of man, I wanted to lose myself in him. At the same time, I felt nothing at all. Shinchaw City and its stench. Its warrens filled with burned bodies. Churned gore in filthy puddles, splashing on the ruined hovercars as our golems tromped through. I wanted the promise of him. I wanted to believe in him. I knew what he wanted from me. He wanted me to let him apologize. To let him beg. To let him swear never to do this again.
But he had made it clear what he really thought of me. An apology couldn’t take that back. No night in the dark, lost in comfort, could take that back. No devotions could take that back. I could not allow him to make promises, lest I believe him.
He managed to reach my face and wipe some tears away with the heel of his hand.
“Liam, I’m so sorry. I love you. I do,” I could hear his voice creaking. “I’m so sorry. Please stay. Gods of man, I am begging you. You don’t have to forgive me, please hate me, hit me, just stay. You’re my whole life, you’re everything. I’m so sorry.” This was new. In the twenty years we had known each other, I had never heard him sound broken. I knew he meant every word, in the moment. I did not expect what came next. “I’ll give this all up, we can go. As soon as our obligation is over. We won’t renew. I won’t go to command school. No – we could just go now. I want to go. I want to get out of here. With you. Now. I want to go. Please, love, let’s just go.”
My breath caught in a choke. I could not meet his gaze. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing. His words hit like rain on a barren field. Those words were years overdue. The relief came too late, even with that sacreligious suggestion of desertion. Despite his pleas, I turned inward. Very unlike him to suggest something so forbidden. He must be quite shaken. I could not turn away from him, and I could not reach for him.
“They would kill us,” someone said. The simple, empty truth. “I don’t want you to die, mo kree.” Who was using the Old Speech?
Aki was close now, hands clutching the sides of my neck, thumbs on my cheeks. His damp forehead pressed mine. His wet hair dripped onto my nose. I could smell the soap from the base shower. I could smell panic in his fresh sweat. The smell of him. Home. His lips touched mine, familiar and gentle, wet with salt tears. My body stirred, yearning to comfort him. My stomach turned, repulsed by his earlier contempt. Something deep inside me was keening. A banshee’s wail. Aki was talking again, babbling, his voice cracking. “I love you,” over and over. “Stay,” over and over. “I’m sorry,” over and over.
The spotlight had long since turned off.
“Liam?” I heard a different voice call, interrupting my emptiness. Blessed relief rushed through me. I turned my head toward that sound. My bleary eyes struggled to pick out a shape. Aki groaned, and slid his hands down to clutch my shirt. “Lee,” he choked out, so quiet that only I could hear. “Stay. Please.”
“Here,” I answered the call. He was going to keep looking until he found me, anyway. James emerged from the direction of the mess tent. The light clicked on. When he saw us, he stopped.
“Should I leave?” He asked. “Wait. Your face -”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be along. In a bit.”
James stepped closer. “Aki – what’s going on?”
James rested his hand on my elbow. It calmed me. James never judged me, never asked more of me. Never asked me to be different or better. James had punched me once, too. But I’d deserved that. I chuckled at the memory, forgetting the present.
“I fucked up.” Aki.
I lost track of the words between them.
I felt my stomach heave. My thoughts were chaotic, but I knew I was being fought over like some mistreated dog. James let go of me to berate Aki. Aki’s shaking fingers released my shirt. While the people who loved me distracted each other, I took the opportunity to slip into the night alone.
I was deep into the darkness when I heard, “Fuck! Liam!” Aki’s creaking voice. “I’m sorry. Please. Please come back.”
I kept walking. I knew they both thought I had completely shut off, locked in one of my episodes. To my own surprise, I discovered I was quite lucid.
I had smoked almost every cigarette in my secret pack by the time James found me. He flopped beside me in the dirt. He took the pack off my thigh, felt around in it, then lit the last one himself.
“How’d you find me?” I asked.
“If you didn’t want to be found, you wouldn’t have sent up a smoke signal.” I could hear the eyeroll. He nudged me. “He didn’t mean it.”
“You don’t even know what he said,” I mumbled.
“I know what this place has done.” James’ hand found my face, turned it toward his. I looked back at the shape of him for a long time. He waited.
A few moments of calm. James flicked the lighter into life. In my memory, the flame lit a sketchbook, which he had snuck into Kinnomori Military Academy. Now, the dancing flame cast patterns over his face, his shoulder. He must have seen my face change, because he smiled.
I knuckled his chin. He dropped his face to catch my fingers. My tension eased. I touched my fingertips to his chest, over his heart.
“I’m alright,” I said. I meant it. The part of me that James kept always would be.
I lifted my head to stare helplessly at the stars. I traced the craters of the moons, then the curves of the Torch, stuck forever in high orbit.
James’ cigarette crackled.
“None of us are who we used to be,” he said as he exhaled. Smoke drifted past me.
Except me. All I could ever be was me, and all that had ever done was upset everyone.
