Work Text:
When Kiske found him he'd been kneeling in the snow for several minutes already, holding it gingerly between his fingers and wiping at the back cover with his thumb, over and over again, trying to read the familiar writing. Sol could feel him watching, and he imagined the expression on the boy's face -- confusion, consternation, mild impatience. On another day he might have drawled something confrontational, something a little barbed; a "do you need something?" or "did you miss me that much?" He knew he'd missed the formation and headcount, but he couldn't for the life of him imagine why Kiske had come himself to look for him, when there were so many dozens of important and decorated men and women willing to run and jump and fetch at the slightest flicker of an eyelash from him.
He didn't feel like fielding the kid's ruffled feathers just now. He smoothed the case with his thumb again, trying vainly to wipe away age old scratches in the cracked plastic. There were others scattered around, most of them ground into dust and splintery pieces by the march of time, of hundreds of years of weather and trespassing feet. The building itself had been free-standing at some point, but some massive impact had knocked it onto its side. There was ancient crusted blackness slashed across the rubble here and there; it was clear enough what had happened.
"You were missed, during the count," said Kiske from behind him. "Beauregard informed me that he'd seen you returning to the field after the fighting was over, otherwise there would be a search party out right now." As Sol had predicted, he sounded irritated, perhaps a little more than he might usually have been. Kiske in his office and before a battle was a very different person than Kiske after a battle, he was beginning to learn.
"What exactly are you doing?"
Sol opened the jewel case carefully. The disc inside was split neatly in two, the white phoenix bisected, the heraldry lions eternally separated.
"Oh, oh, people of Earth," he said, unable to coax the words in song but finding them almost in prayer instead. "Listen to the warning, the prophet he said -- for soon the cold of night will fall, summoned by your own hand."
When he looked up Kiske was staring at him, faintly tense, for once with nothing to say, and for once Sol was glad of it.
"He told of death as a done white haze, taking the lost and the unloved babe. Late, too late, all the wretches run -- these kinds of beasts now counting their days."
"What?" Kiske whispered. He looked a bit pale. Sol smiled at him, and tossed the broken disc back into the ancient rubble.
"Don't tell me you don't know the story of Noah and the ark," he said, and stood up, the heavy and much loathed armory sword banging against his hip in its sheath.
"Well, yes, but--"
"So am I grooming horses or cleaning latrines when we get back, or what?"
Kiske lowered the hand he'd half outstretched. "You," he said, and turned his head away to cough into his fist briefly, trying to clear the unexpected roughness away. "You... no. I only came to tell you that if you have some reason to not be present during formation count, I would appreciate being informed beforehand."
Sol turned around and gave him an exaggerated, sarcastic salute, which put some of the anger back into the boy's face. "If you go missing without explanation," Kiske added, a little extra poison at the tip of his blade, "We won't have time to send a search party."
"Fine. I don't really need one anyway."
He picked his way out of the rubble and back into the snowdrifts, his boots already soaked through and steaming in great puffs of white. The sword banged into his thigh with bruising force and he fought the urge to rip it from his belt and throw it as hard as he could into the city's wreckage, just to see how far it would go. There was no point in waiting. There was no point in trying to play by any rules. All that remained for him in places like this were reminders of a sensical world, an accessible one -- a world as gone and forgotten now as any other number of ancient civilizations swallowed by the seas and sands of their old gods.
Only one relic left.
I'm just going to fucking confront Undersn and threaten to set his beard on fire until he tells me where it is.
"Was that poetry?"
Kiske's blond head appeared beside him, even as he walked with his longest strides. The boy had no trouble keeping up. The cold had put pink into his cheeks, and he huffed slightly. His eyes were bright and curious. Sol glanced at him in sidelong disbelief.
"No," he said, gruffly. "It was music."
"Oh," said Kiske.
For a moment the only sound was the crunch of their boots in the snow.
"I enjoy music very much," said Kiske, a little more softly. When Sol glanced up again he was looking away with an air of faint embarrassment. "It's very difficult to come by, in reproduced forms. You must have been very lucky, to have such access."
Sol was no longer feeling like the triumphant victor of a debate. He was feeling a little more like an asshole.
"Yeah," he said, and leaned over to elbow Kiske lightly. The boy looked at him, startled by such intimacy, and Sol grinned. "If I find anymore, I'll share it with you, all right?"
Kiske lifted his eyebrows a little. "I suppose," he said, "That such a task would be worth skipping a formation for." He smiled in return, an expression that lit his face and brightened his eyes and erased the hard and worried tension in his jaw and his forehead, and for the first time Sol realized with unguarded vulnerability that there was more to the boy's beauty than his physicality, more to the strange sun-lightness of him than the pale of his hair and skin. There was something in the boy's very essence that seduced the heart and pulled at the soul, and perhaps all these worshipful lackeys and trusting old men weren't entirely off base.
"I'll find you something you'll like, Sir," Sol said, and while it had been worth it before to bait and look for the flicker of storm, it was worth it now too, to see that sunlight again in the boy's grateful smile.