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When they first started training together, Tea told Jace to find one nice thing and hang onto it as tight as he could. At the moment, it's the anime Seasons of Hieron, which Orth had introduced him to, and at this moment, it's sitting shoulder to shoulder with Addax in Jace’s bunk, watching said anime. Jace feels that, if he were standing planetside, his crush would be visible from orbit, but Addax has never mentioned it. Jace assumes that Addax is sparing his feelings, but he doesn't mind too much.
A nice thing is a nice thing, even when you don’t speak your feelings aloud.
“So who’s that?” Addax asks, pointing at the screen.
“Which one?”
“The lady in the dress.”
“Oh, she was just introduced—but she’s the empress of Nacre.”
“Oh, um, whatshisname’s sister?”
“Yeah. Calhoun, or Angelo. Depending.” At that moment, Adelaide rises from her throne to greet Hella, Fero, and Lem. Jace’s bunk is dark except for the light of the screen they’re watching on, from which flows the sunlight of the deathless empire of Nacre.
“You think Calhoun picked that name for himself?” Addax asks.
“Shh!” Jace says, at first aiming to place his finger against Addax’s lips, but then thinking better of it and lightly tapping him on the side of his jaw instead. “You’re gonna miss it!”
“I’m reading the subtitles!” Addax protests, but falls silent anyway. The episode ends. The credits roll. “Huh. Is Hella gonna kill Calhoun?”
Jace shrugs, letting a cheeky grin take hold of his mouth. “Guess you’ll have to keep watching and find out.”
“How many seasons of this thing are there?”
Jace sighs, slumping back in his bed. The presence of the bed and Jace and Addax’s location thereupon is awkward and unavoidable. The bunk only has one chair aside from it, and it’s uncomfortable as hell. Jace can feel his ass going numb every time he sits on it. There’s a moment where he feels like a teenager again, sitting in his bedroom with his middle school crush. Before Addax, before Tea, before the war, before anything and everything had ever happened to him. “Just one,” he says. “They were gonna make more and then. You know. War.”
Addax nods solemnly. “War.”
“But Orth thinks they’ll make more once the whole deal’s over and done with. I hope so. There are a lot of threads left hanging at the end of the season.”
“You never answered my question.”
“Which was?”
“If you think Calhoun chose his own name.”
“Oh, um, this gets answered later, he um, took it from a—you know what, you’ll just have to watch the episode. I’m not answering any more of your questions until we’ve finished the season.”
“Oh fuck you!” Addax laughs, picking up Jace’s pillow and smacking him with it.
“The short answer is yes!” Jace falls backwards, laughing too, nearly tumbling off the bed. “It’s yes, okay?” He takes in Addax’s smile. Commits it to memory. The lines of it, the gap in his teeth, his chapped lips. He wants to draw it, only he’s never been good at drawing, so he might just have to settle for writing a detailed description. A question enters his mind, then. One that might be rude to ask. “Did you choose your name?”
“Um. No.” It sounds at first like Addax doesn’t want to elaborate, but then he does: “Candidate names are assigned when we’re chosen. And that’s it.”
“Do you like yours?”
“It’s alright. Could be worse.”
“You could change it. I changed mine.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I’m trans, remember?”
“Right. Of course.” Addax pauses, seemingly lost in thought. “I don’t think it works like that for me. We have our Candidate names and that’s it.”
Jace lies down on his side on the bed, his hands tucked under his ear, looking up at Addax where he remains, upright. He can barely contain his longing. It swells in his chest like a balloon. He imagines the two of them, in another life, together, and aches for it. And yet he still feels so lucky that he can have even this. Just to look at him is a joy and a privilege. “Tell me about it. Being a Candidate.” It’s the one part of Addax that’s completely cut off from him, that he doesn’t and may never understand. For so long Divines were little more than grim specters of death, shadows over valleys of ashes, their Candidates either horrific puppets or trained assassins, wielding Divines like poison daggers.
But now that Oricon and the Diaspora were working together and Peace was riding along with their convoy and Addax was right here and patient and warm and beautiful and watching anime with him—Jace needs to know. Needs to know how things really are.
“Well, when you’re a kid, they pick you out,” Addax begins. “I was ten but it varies. There’s an aptitude test that you have to take and they do biometrics on you, too. I don’t know if they’re even actually measuring anything, to be honest; it might just be random. And then you go through training and then you sit tight for a little while until a Divine needs a new Candidate and then the Divine picks you. Out of all the kids that are there. And that’s what happened to me.”
“And when do you get to retire?”
Addax’s eyes widen and he laughs, a harsh bark of a laugh, very different from his normal, soft chuckle. “Jace, Candidates don’t retire. They—we just die. And, I dunno, maybe I’ll be different. Peace takes good care of me. Better care of me than most Divines do their Candidates, anyway. But I can’t get my hopes up. I can’t plan too far ahead.”
“Oh.” Jace doesn’t say anything else. He feels he’s ruined it, his one nice thing. He doesn’t move, too worried that Addax might just get up and leave and not speak to him again.
Instead he says, “Can we watch another episode?”
Quashing the tide of relief that rises up in him, Jace puts on the next episode of Seasons of Hieron without another word. This episode focuses on Hadrian, Throndir, and Fantasmo as they finally arrive at the fallen tower at the center of the Mark of the Erasure. “I really like this arc. You meet some really cool secondary characters,” Jace says, hoping to expel some of his own awkwardness.
“Do you have a favorite?” Addax asks. “Secondary or otherwise?”
“We finally meet Samot this arc. He’s really interesting. I hope there’s more of him next season.”
Addax shoots Jace a look that Jace can’t quite parse. “Samot? The blond dude Hadrian’s been dreaming about?”
“Yep.”
Addax is silent for a moment before saying, stoically, “I think Hadrian needs to figure out some things.”
This time, when Jace breaks into guffawing, hysterical laughter, he really does fall off the bed, rolling across the hard vinyl floor of his bunk.
“Jace!” Addax exclaims, pausing the episode and leaning over the edge of the bed. “Are you okay?”
“Fine, fine!” Jace wheezes. He can feel his cheeks reddening and his hair coming untucked from his headband. “You’re right, you’re just right, that’s all. It caught me off guard.” He stands up, brushes himself off, sits himself back on the bed. “Anyway. But of the main six my favorite is Throndir.”
Addax nods. “That makes sense. He reminds me of you.”
Jace cocks his head. “How so?”
“Desperate to please.”
Jace slaps his hand against his forehead. “Is it that obvious?”
“Sorry.” A pause, then, “But it’s more than that. He’s kind and dedicated. And he’s got all this energy, you know? All this energy and nowhere to put it. He’s all fire, no fuel.”
Jace sits up a little straighter. “‘All fire, no fuel’? Did you just come up with that off the top of your head?”
Addax nods.
“It’s good. You should write it down.”
“I will.” Then Addax pauses again. “Even if I don’t have a name after Addax, I had one beforehand.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll tell you what it was, but you have to promise not to laugh.”
“Cross my heart.” Jace makes a crossing motion over his chest.
“Romeo.”
“No way.”
“Way.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Hand to God it’s true.”
“I believe you, then.” And he does. Does he trust Addax? It’s hard to say. They haven’t known each other that long. But he is enamored with him, punch drunk on this one nice thing the universe let him have in the midst of all of this. “Do you wanna keep watching?”
“Please.”
Jace hits play as Fantasmo reunites with Sunder Havelton.
He wakes up later. The room is near pitch black with the screen off. He must’ve fallen asleep during one of the episodes. It takes him a moment to realize that Addax is still present, and not only that, but that Jace’s arms are wrapped around his midsection, his face pressed into his stomach where Addax sits upright. He’s mortified. He’s completely, utterly mortified. Too stunned to even move. And Addax is still awake, of course; his heart is beating too rapidly to belong to anyone on the far side of sleep. He’s tense, too. Weirdly so.
And then he makes a noise, a strange, sharp, harsh noise. His whole body shudders with it. Jace realizes with a quickening of his own heart rate that it’s a sob. Addax is choking down tears. He gasps and gulps, and a hot little bead of water lands on Jace’s head. “Please, God,” Addax is whispering— praying? But praying to whom? Peace? Another Divine? Or someone else? “Please, God,” Addax says again, his voice soft and choked. “Let me have this one nice thing. Please let me have this one nice thing.”
And Jace can’t lie there motionless anymore. He sits up, wraps his arms around Addax’s shoulders, nuzzles the place behind his ear with his nose. Addax doesn’t stop crying, but he does hug Jace back, letting himself shudder apart in his arms. “I’m here,” Jace whispers. “I’m here.”