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There aren’t usually funerals in the Syndicate. She knew this as well as she knew everything about life through their eyes; soldiers die every day, it was what they were hired to do. Mao’s tired lecture lilts in her head, that thinly-veiled exhaustion that carried him through life ever-present in his ghost. Julia doesn’t believe in ghosts. No, Julia doesn’t much believe in anything these days. “If we held a funeral for every grunt and contractor that died on our payroll we’d flood the streets with incense and ashes.” and every shrapnel belt with urns and wood body bags, it’d be too expensive. Even for the Van. She’s had that bit of dogma drilled into her head since she was young, younger than anyone should be in that bombed out warehouse they brought new recruits every year to test their mettle.
She’s sitting on the window ledge in the cramped living space of her shitty seventy-eighth medicine cache on Venus. It’s a dusty place, and hasn't been furnished with anything new since she bought it, twenty years ago. Nothing on the shelves, in the pantry, no sheets on the bed. Barer bones never existed.
“Julia.” It’s not spoken like a question, though she knows it was supposed to be, she’s been slipping lately, too exhausted to hide much but the bags under her eyes with a smear of foundation and powder. His voice scrapes over the gravel perpetually shoved down his throat even over the staticky, cheap comm desk she bought for scraps and outfitted to be undetectable. Old tech is harder to trace, always had been since Titan. Mao taught her that too. It’s balanced on her lap, crooked over her skinny legs crossed at their ankles, and she wonders if Vicious has tracked the dutch angle it must be giving her on his end of things.
“I heard you the first time.” She dutifully ignores the way he rolls his eyes, that little smidgen of personality that only unfurled when he was alone. You can’t get more alone than talking to a dead woman. “Seems like such a waste.”
“You were close.” it stings more than it has any right to.
She doesn't begrudge him his bluntness. “So were you, once upon a time.” She doesn’t let him get away with it scot free either.
“Julia.” This time he says her name like a cherry pit in his mouth, escaping through his perpetually-clenched teeth with a hiss that reminds her of steam in the industrial district. He doesn’t say much else, and the silence hangs between them as it always has, dead and sharpened, buzzing.
They don’t hold funerals for dealers either and, “you don’t usually make house-calls about casualties.” Part of her wants to tag on ‘what gives?’ to the end of that, like they’re picking apart each others standard issues during basic training (the second half, where they separated the lieutenants from the canon fodder), him with mechanical precision and her while shamelessly gossiping about all the adults that didn’t notice a scrappy tween while they soap-opera’d themselves into oblivion. She almost misses it. Almost.
“You were close.” He says again, in that infuriatingly vague way he does when they’re on the line alone with each other. She never liked poetry, and so he minced his words with as little metaphor as he was humanly capable of.
She could reply with the same thing she did not five minutes ago, and it would be tempting to just run him in circles with his love of formula– but she’s not that petty. Not today at least. “You reached me on this line–” this line that only he had access to, that was only ever called to warn her of threats that weren’t his forces in their years-long game, that he never called out of anything but necessity, that he knew if he used too often would get her found out by whoever was trying to pull his leash that rotation, that let her stay as far away as the other end of the galaxy from Spike for as long as she chose, “-- to tell me about some dead Callistian roomate I had ages ago? Vicious you mock me.” her voice has sharpened to the knife’s edge, blind to where she’s pointed it, unconscious of why she’s even mad at him. Mad at him for this, of all things.
If she’s even really mad at all.
They don't have funerals in the Syndicate. She never had anyone teach her how to grieve.
She looks back into his colorless eyes, their pupils pinpricks of material so black it’s stopped reflecting light altogether, and marks the way they twitch minutely over her features, where her expression has scrunched in anger, the rawness to her tone that sound like she’s on the verge of crying, if she was still capable of it. He says nothing, just sits there with her, thousands of billions of kilometers away. It’s what they do for each other. She kind of hates him for it.
“Why did you tell me.” And before he can open his mouth and make her wish she could still grab his tongue and pull until he winces and shuts up, “if you say “because you were close” one more time I will do worse than tie your cervical nerves in a knot.”
He shrugs almost imperceptibly, much like a bird readjusting their perch before deigning to sing, and waits a minute more before continuing. “You deserve to know. Your name was on his lips when he went.”
“Because you were using it to remain anonymous.” among other things.
“So are you.” among other things.
She just looks back at him, lets herself feel petulant and young again. It’s one of the smaller secrets between them. Spike used to tell her she was hard to read, and she remembers the way he startled when Vicious laughed from the other side of the small table they were huddled over, conspiratorially, late into the morning and nursing something cold to kill the adrenaline in their hands. He was all jerking bird bones back then, less coordinated and detached from the world he lived in. Hopelessly in love with the weary skeleton across from him.
“Tell me,” she says after the silence has lapsed into something darker in the late hours. She can feel the burning Venus sun on her shoulders, prickling her scalp through the layers of UV fields that surround each city center. She knows it lights up her blue eyes white. She knows he admires the glow it gives her, with no other weight than the simple creature-comfort of something breathtaking. The one gaze that doesn’t make her feel stripped bare and unclean. “Tell me, what did you do to him?”
He chuckles in that silent-film way he does, the noise abandoned somewhere in his diaphragm. She always wanted to tear him apart to find out why it does that, why his laughter is always disjointed from conception. There aren’t enough high end medical supplies that could grant her that, but a girl’s gotta dream.
“I tried to detonate him with his purchase.” there’s an edge of wistful fondness to it, the same one she knows she’s failed to disguise before. “Nothing gave it away but the unusual weight the container had to it. Just a bit lighter and I would have had him.”
She finds she’s started to smile just a bit, that odd understanding of the world that tangles them up in each other again and again. She doesn’t begrudge him his murder, she would be a hypocrite to. “Of course you have the weight memorized.” she says instead, and leans back against the brick of the inner wall, casts her gaze to the simpering cityscape ahead of her. It’s always so warm here, it reaches under her skin and pulls every fibre of her being apart and stitches it back together a humid wreck. If leaving had one benefit it was wearing colors other than black.
“I wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t.” and she wants to fire back some quip about how it’s always life and death with him, and knows he would dig a knife under her skin with how it’s always limbo with her.
“Why are you so sure the weight’s what did him in.”
“He’s a shrewder dealer than I’ve ever been.” the admission slips out easier than she thinks he expected it to. “He shot the case. Then my lieutenant. Then at me.”
She almost winces, Lin was a good kid. A little too loyal, a little too idealistic. A little too dead now to care, but that came with the job. She doesn’t ask if his family was still in mourning.
Vicious guesses anyway. “His mother came to see me. She’s a thankless person, but her family has enough to buy grown ingredients.” she whistles appreciatively, and notes how it must have broken up in transmission by the quirk of his lip into a small smile, “it was a delicious soup.”
“And you savored every undeserved ounce I bet.”
“Yes.”
Their conversation rests for just a bit more. The sun sets quicker than it did on Callisto. Neither of them get cold easily. She wonders if Vicious would find the weather here as awful as she did. Maybe she’ll find out.
“So he shot at you.”
“He missed,” he says this as if it's commentary on the weather, some uninteresting fact noted out of indifferent necessity, “his hands shake, when he holds his weapon.” and some strange reverence crosses his words, like tracing over the small details of the art he never wanted for himself but always stared peculiarly at, memorizing each and every imperfection and mark of humanity, twinged with some satisfaction she knows is there because he thinks himself the reason for it. That imperfection, that unwillingness to fire on a comrade, former or not.
He, too, was a little too idealistic. A little too loyal.
“He always kept his guns at a distance,” she murmurs in return, “which was idiotic, given the state of things.”
Vicious nods, and she traces the movement out of the corner of her eye, the way his matted curls not so much as bounce but sway with him, white with stress and malnutrition, lost of the color that only marked him when they were very young, and very angry. “Callisto is a blackhole for order.” how succinct, he puts things.
She could have left it there. Let it lie still and spend the rest of the call idle with some facsimile of rest, listening to the shuffle of papers on his end, the bustle of the city from hers. Restock her supplies, complain about the state of things. Hear his voice laden with the tedium of his position as he filled her in on Syndicate movements, the great red dragon twisting through the stars to swallow them all, giving only as much of an edge as to make the challenge of catching up to her more hideous than it was already. Just to delay the end of the game. It was as if no time had passed since they started. Still the same shadows in the same rooms, the only change the amount of scars they carried. The lack of a third to their triplet. Return to her grief, whatever that means.
God, she feels too old for this.
“Did you run him through?”
“He never let me get that close.” it makes her laugh, the respect that vignettes that statement. Shameful pride in a man he didn’t care all that much for.
She finds herself nodding, equal parts glee and understanding, and toys with the end of her braid. Fishtail, the only type she could never figure out before Callisto.
“I shot his craft down, I would have preferred not to, but there were complications to my afternoon.” he’s not much of a storyteller, all the facts of his recounts barren and listless, and yet for a moment she can easily picture the mop of dark green hair and tastelessly crumpled suit that makes up what Vicious calls a “complication”.
She wonders, not for the first time today, why she hasn’t stopped talking yet. They had gone longer stretches not talking to each other. They had gone further distances than this. It feels strange, and she can’t put her finger on why, now of all times. They’ve always had an easy way with each other, a practiced comfort they could keep in each other. So why now, when it is still just them, he in an office and she in an empty apartment in some far-flung corner of the world, why did it feel like a noose? A suffocating, horrible uncertainty, a wrongness.
There are no funerals for soldiers.
“Did he die on impact?” she says instead, and prays Vicious has the grace to leave well enough alone tonight, to spare her the peeling of her skin back until the fat and muscle is laid bare and shivering. There might not be a god in the sky she sleeps under, but there are worse things than following a ritual she never put her heart in.
“No. He didn’t last much longer, despite their best efforts.” she imagines the slight sag in his shoulders is unrelated, the tension that arches across his body is the pressure of the Van, of his cohort, and nothing more.
It makes her skin crawl, to imagine him whispering her name to Spike, a dying breath lacking the context that would have made him hold it. She hopes he had the wherewithal to withhold her state of being from him, to keep her last secret. She hopes too, that the brief uncomfortable panic hasn’t made itself so known through the indistinct imaging on her holoscreen. She’ll find Spike when she’s ready. Not a minute before, and she’ll never give him the satisfaction of finding her first. Never again. Never.
And after a beat, “He was flying to Titan the last I saw of him.”
Silence swallows them both. The sun dips below the pharmacy down the street, washes the streets in an insipid red.
There’s an emptiness to his eyes, she notices, a strange glassy sheen that makes him look younger somehow, robs his face of that mask in incomplete seconds, struggling desperately to remain impassive. Or perhaps struggling to hold on to anything but the anger and the emptiness that makes horrible homes in his hollow spaces. Neither of them comment on it for a long time. They just sit, her in her empty apartment, him in his empty office, and let the knowledge sit with them, an invited guest.
Did he make it, she wonders, and does not say aloud. Did he see the stars he talked to her in whispered fever about? Did he recognize the constellations still? She knows he couldn't have, in the state he must have been in to bring the miserable quiet out of Vicious.
Maybe minutes pass, maybe only seconds. She slides the machine off her lap, sets it down on the cushion in front of her, and crosses the room to where she stashed her ibuprofen between the fourth stair to the second floor, jammed under a couple layers of rotting board and a dead rat for good measure. She didn’t have to be this paranoid, no one was going to look too hard at this place, but it never paid to leave loose ends. Even if it was convenient. Even if she wanted to. God knows she was paying for the one time she did now. All this talking around of grief, it was giving her a headache. Vicious makes no comment of it, staring obediently at the wall she was sat against like it was all he’d ever been facing.
He continues not to comment when she returns to focus with a chipped mug full of moonshine (homemade) and rebalanced the screen so he wasn’t looking at her abdomen. Not that he would have minded, given their habits, but her humor was easier to read when her face was in view.
“Is that everything?” she says after a while, quieter than she meant to, louder than she feels like she should.
There’s a hesitation to him that she rarely sees, better natures fighting like dogs behind his eyelids. She liked to watch, when it’s anything but him debating asking her something. Makes the hair at the back of her neck raise.
Longer than it normally takes him to make up his mind but quicker than she can lay into him for hesitating, the winner is decided in that unseen cage match, and the victor limps bloody out of the ring. He goes, “I won’t look, if you decide to grieve.” and what he really says is “I won’t gloat, if you break over him.”
It would be the first time. She’s not a sentimental person, no remaining affections for sexual partners and no lingering regret over missed “lovers”, what an ugly word. Julia is not a widow. No bleeding heart belongs in her chest. The Syndicate mourns in strange ways, ghost stories and whispered praises. Silent processions of those who knew the deceased, retreating to their flats and businesses with not one casting an eye back on the corpse. Annie was perhaps the only person she knew to grieve, and Annie wasn’t all Syndicate, not really. She would laugh to call the woman ‘more human’ than the rest of them, but she loved louder than a lot of them. And she fought Mao for weeks to let her host a wake of sorts when Ivan died. They played poker until the sun rose again. It was maybe the only time she saw a lot of her cohort cry. The Van didn’t approve, but when did they ever? Shriveled carcasses spouting half-guesses and vague approximations of futures past until their lungs gave out for the evening. Vicious was offworld, didn’t hear about it until he returned two months later, and by that point it was too late to do anything but hold onto the loss, wordlessly. Annie offered to have him over once, to catch up, to grieve, and his eyes went cold and unfeeling, and they never spoke of it again.
“Why?” She gets out before she can think twice of it. A challenge, a question. Why would she break over him of all people, why would he do such a stupid thing as to give her an opening.
His eyes aren’t sad, but they aren’t devoid of emotion either. “It wouldn’t be a show worth watching.” And she laughs at him, really truly laughs at him. And she stops. And they don’t speak for many minutes more.
“Why don’t you do it then.” the dead sit between them like an uninvited guest. Mourners' rights, who wants this corpse on their hands. One of the only people who knew them both.
“I don’t know how to.”
And there is nothing she can say to that.