Chapter Text
"Hey—man.”
Kreis nearly drops his book as the barrack mattress creaks and dips behind him.
“Sorry—” mutters Leon, voice low in his ear. “—You wanna go see General Gunther’s tank with me?”
“What do you mean?” Kreis cranes his neck back at him. “Are they doing some kind of exhibit?”
They’re always worried about morale in the Gallian militia. Showing off the greatest historical victories sounds like the kind of thing they’d do, if they had the resources for it—but they haven’t. By now Kreis is very familiar with the resources they haven’t got.
“No—better.” Leon had clearly been worried this was something he’d heard already: he looks delighted to be the one to tell him. “His son’s joining up. He’s got his old man’s tank, and they’re gonna use it. It’s in there now, man! C’mon!”
“His—what?”
Kreis has seen that tank. He’s seen it in action. From a distance, held back in his mother’s arms at the edge of the kitchen window, watching the cannon swivel in the smoke. He never thought he’d see it again. He still dreams of it sometimes. He’s never told this to Leon, but in more ways than one, that tank is the reason he’s here.
“The Edelweiss?” he asks, as if anybody less than obsessed would know it by name. “They’re letting us near that?”
They’re a couple of dropouts, barely twenty. There’s plenty more qualified mechanics, and Belgen Gunther’s Edelweiss is a national treasure.
“Well—”
Leon knows that as well as he does, but that kind of thing never matters to him very much.
“Could be—but, y’know, just in case they don’t—wanna go see?”
“I mean…”
Leon grips his shoulders and shakes. “Belgen fucking Gunther, man!”
Kreis dog-ears his page and puts his book down.
It’s just…sitting there.
It doesn’t look like any of the other tanks. Both of them can pick it out at a hundred paces. It’s nearly twice the size and the armor’s different entirely. The tanks the militia’s got are drawn from the Edelweiss’s strides, of course—but they’re more economically made. Only one tank can only do so much, after all, no matter how perfect, and the destruction of only one perfect tank would be a much greater loss. More than anything, Gallia plans on contingency.
Leon whistles reverently, hands on his hips.
“Wow,” says Kreis under his breath.
As a child, he hadn’t gotten close. He’d spent a lifetime since wishing that he had. That he’d said anything better to General Belgen Gunther than thanks, mister out in the crowd in the town square that night—that he’d asked him questions. That he’d known what questions to ask, that he’d known how much he’d want to know the answers. That he’d known how much effort they’d be to find on his own.
He steps closer.
“What d’you think they’ve been doing with this thing all this time?” Leon asks. “Sure looks like they’ve been keeping it up.”
“Gunther was still using it until he died,” says Kreis. “After that, I don’t know.” He rounds the front, looking up at the barrel. “You’d think the army would’ve wanted to keep it, though—it sounds like they were involved in development.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. From what I could tell, it was some sort of contract. Theimer and Gunther were handpicked.”
He leans in to look closer at the tiny flower painted on the tank’s side. He restrains himself from reaching out to touch it.
“Though the war was over then, I guess,” he says. “Maybe they never expected they’d need it again.”
Leon hums, amused. “Man,” he says. “I’d’ve told you quicker if I knew you were obsessed.”
“Shut up,” mumbles Kreis, but he can’t be mad. He’s too in awe to be mad. “It’s interesting. Look, the plating—they were the first to—"
The hatch clanks open.
Kreis yelps in surprise, stumbling into Leon, who stumbles into a nearby crate. The girl that had popped out of the tank also yelps, leaning over them from the top. “Oh—I’m sorry! I didn’t realize anyone was here!”
They steady themselves and stare up at her. It’s a teenage girl. She’s in civilian clothing, a dress and Darcsen cape, and Kreis glances to Leon to make sure he’s never seen her before either.
“Do you work in the hangar?” she asks.
Kreis’s tongue still doesn’t work. “Yeah,” says Leon.
“I’m not in your way, am I?”
They shake their heads.
“Please let me know if I am,” she says, earnest. “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”
She climbs out of the tank and hops gracefully to the floor. They take a step back to make room.
“Even in school, I’ve never worked someplace as large as this,” she says, looking around the cavernous hangar with a timid little smile. “It’s exciting, but…a bit intimidating.” She extends a hand to Leon. “I’m Isara.”
There’s still a vague gobsmacked ring to his voice, but he shakes her hand. “Leon.”
She offers her hand to Kreis next, who looks back up at the Edelweiss as he shakes it and finally comes up with something to say. “You heard too, huh?”
“Shit,” says Leon, impressed. “Even I wouldn’t’a climbed right in there.”
Isara shakes her head, a little pink. “Oh, no, it’s not like that!” she says. “I drove the tank in.”
“What?”
“I haven’t had the chance to change into my militia uniform yet, but I’ll be operating the Edelweiss.”
“What?”
Kreis glances once more toward Leon, who looks vaguely stunned. He’d have been prepared to lose out to a more experienced engineer, but to lose out to a strange teenager is more of a shock.
“You are?”
“Welkin Gunther’s not doin’ that?”
“It’s a two-man tank,” says Isara. “Welks is manning the cannon and commanding the squad, so I’m going to drive him.”
Leon opens his mouth, presumably to ask how the fuck she managed that, but Kreis cuts him off.
“It’s a two-man tank?”
He’d always thought it a likely possibility, but he’d never been sure. The Edelweiss was a military asset. As good as classified—which Kreis could understand, of course. If a fascinated teenage boy could get his hands on any information, so could an Imperial spy. But it had still been frustrating. For years he’d accepted his fascination as futile.
Kreis stops short for a moment, mouth still open. This had happened so quickly that he hadn’t yet fully processed how insane it is to be standing here.
Isara turns back to him, curious. “…Yes, it is.”
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, cringing under her perplexed gaze. “I’ve been trying to learn more about the Edelweiss for years, but there isn’t much information out there. Definitely not any plans.” On his first day off in Randgriz he’d been able to track down some blueprints of Theimer’s early work, but never his magnum opus. “It sounds like the production was top secret.”
And—he must sound like a lunatic. What kind of person puts this much effort into learning about one tank? Kreis swallows, embarrassed.
But Isara doesn’t seem bothered. “Yes,” she says. “It was. It was a government weapons development contract after EWI.”
Just as he’s gotten up the nerve again to look directly at her, she tilts her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I got your name?”
“Oh—no, you didn’t. Sorry about that.” He awkwardly clears his throat. “Private Kreis Czherny.”
It dawns on him very abruptly that if she’s operating the tank, she’s a superior officer. Hurriedly, he salutes. Beside him, Leon follows suit—he hadn’t thought about it either. Isara hadn’t thought about it either, it seems. She glances between them, abashed and pink-cheeked.
“It’s nice to meet you, Kreis.”
“You too.” He hesitates for a second. “Do you mind if I, um, ask how you know all of this? Do you know the family? Or…?”
She nods. “I’ve been working on the Edelweiss for years. It was my father’s.”
“Your father was Belgen Gunther?” asks Leon, too perplexed for politeness. But it’s an obvious question, and Isara knows it.
“Yes,” she says, and her mouth twitches awkwardly. “Sort of, anyways. He was a friend of my parents. He raised me.”
Kreis stops himself, mercifully, from saying Wow aloud. The tragic implications here are obvious. He doesn’t know what to say, however, and neither does Leon.
She goes on. “What I mean to say is that it was my father’s, though. He was an engineer. They met working together on the Edelweiss.”
He’d been so relieved she kept talking that it takes Kreis a couple seconds to put this together. When he does, he’s too taken aback to keep his mouth shut. “I—do you mean Theimer!?”
She looks vaguely embarrassed by his interest, but she nods.
“You’re shittin’ me,” says Leon flatly. Kreis snaps out of his stupor to elbow him.
But Isara just laughs. “No, I swear.”
He can see the resemblance, now that she’s said it. Kreis had only ever found one photo of the man, but he’d memorized it: he’d had Isara’s long face, her gentle eyes. Theimer was around Kreis’s age when that picture was taken. A genius even then, enough to be headhunted for a project of government importance.
He’d died barely later than that.
“I’m—” Tongue-tied, Kreis lowers his eyes. “I’m sorry that your parents…”
Isara shakes her head. “It’s alright,” she says. “I know how to feel close to them, if I need to.”
She glances back at the tank, with a small, wistful smile. It’s something larger than a tank to her too. In the face of this, his own attachment feels much smaller, much more petty and juvenile, but Kreis also can’t deny there’s something nice about meeting somebody who gets it.
Both of them gaze up at the Edelweiss for a few pensive seconds.
“…So that was you, huh?” asks Leon. “In Bruhl?”
Isara turns back, flushed. “Well, Welks was commanding.”
“But you were incredible, man!” Leon laughs sharply, looking up at the tank. “This thing must handle like a dream.”
He smacks the Edelweiss on the flank. Kreis winces. Even though the thing’s built to take gunfire, it still feels like he’d slapped a priceless vase.
Isara doesn’t seem to mind. “It’s a little difficult to maneuver on account of the size,” she replies, “but I’ve made some improvements to the drive system that really help.”
“For real?”
“Do you want to see inside?”
Leon glances sidelong back at Kreis and claps his shoulder. “Well, KC sure does.”
He would be annoyed, but he forgets to be as Isara turns and beams at him. His stomach flips.
“Come on in, then!” she says.
“Can we all fit?”
“I think so! It was a little bit tight, but Welks and Martha and I all fit just fine yesterday.”
“Martha?”
She pauses.
“Well—first of all, don’t worry, I’ve cleaned everything up—"
Kreis has always gotten lost in things. He’s found that to be common in manufacturing. Lots of the people he’d worked with were just doing a job, but lots of them were also this way: focused and meticulous, occasionally to detriment. He’ll look up and he’s lost half the day.
Leon gets lost in things too, but he talks while he does. Carries on a conversation that skips from here to there to there as he spends hours fine-tuning an experimental firing mechanism. It doesn’t even really matter if Kreis replies, and half the time he doesn’t, but he’s still grateful for it. It helps keep his own feet on the ground.
Leon’s talking today. Kreis is listening to the sound of his voice, and it helps, but he can’t focus on the words.
This morning they received the new cannon barrel for the Edelweiss. There are manufacturers near Randgriz who do that part. Once they’ve designed and tested something here they send off to have it mass-produced, so everyone in the militia can kill just a little more easily—or in the case of the Edelweiss, they have just one produced, so Welkin and Isara Gunther can.
Back at home that’s the sort of thing Kreis would have been doing—casting, filing, polishing. It’s what his parents are doing now. In peacetime they made light fixtures, but rifle parts are more necessary than chandeliers nowadays.
Here, he’s got something else to do.
He’s getting more used to seeing the Edelweiss, but touching it is still daunting. Kreis looks up and takes a deep breath. It still feels sacrilegious to unbolt the plating, to dare to improve the armor, to swap out a single screw on the thing.
“Don’t worry about it,” Isara had replied when he said so. “I felt that way too when I first started. But—I think it’s what they would want, isn’t it? To see the Edelweiss be kept up to date?”
He had no idea what they would want, Gunther and Theimer. All he had was the heavy lump of self-consciousness in the pit of his stomach. He bit his lip. “I mean… I guess so?”
“Especially if it helps it survive.” She looked over at him, with a little encouraging smile. “Don’t you think?”
The Edelweiss can take a beating, but it’s also the most vital asset the militia has. They cannot lose this tank. Isara’s a conscientious enough driver to make sure her radiator never hangs out at least, but the Empire’s been busy in the years since this tank last saw battle. There’s still a lot that has to be done to get up to speed.
It would certainly be a bigger disgrace to the Edelweiss’s creators to let anybody blow it up than it would be to update it, at any rate.
He and Isara work closely now. It’s not even her job, technically, but to ignore her as a resource would be negligent at best. Even though she’s much younger (“Sixteen last February,” she’d told them, when Leon had been stunned enough to ask outright), she knows much more about mechanics than Kreis does, and more about this particular tank than anyone alive. And, for that matter, she seems to have a bit of an inventor’s streak. A creative mind. Her own ideas, and the keen enthusiasm to see them made real.
(Kreis wonders vaguely if that sort of thing is heritable.)
He and Isara have put their heads together. Formed a plan of action. What’s outdated that needs to be replaced, what’s outdated but works well enough that it’s not worth the effort. What was ahead of its time. What still is.
Isara has the blueprints. A copy of them, anyway, but they’d been there with the Gunthers all this time. Kreis had never thought he’d ever see them. He’d spent whole days reading them like a holy text, cross-referencing them, taking innumerable notes—familiarizing himself with the reality of everything he’d ever wondered. He has all the time he wants now. It’s not a waste of time anymore; it’s his job.
It’s his job.
He looks down at his wrench, and back up at the Edelweiss. Kreis had never expected the thing to be in his hands. It’s a strange, surreal reversal of the image he’d always had. His job to keep this tank safe.
He can’t help but wonder if Isara put in a good word for him. He can’t bring himself to ask.
Isara spends a lot of time with her tank. Even when there’s nothing to do, she’ll sit on top of it and fiddle around with something else, read a book, sometimes just close her eyes. Kreis doesn’t spend much of his own time anywhere else, so it’s not as if he’s judging her for it, but it surprises him—she hadn’t seemed very much like him at all. Cheerful, open, sociable. Lots of her squad is around her age, after all, and many of them just as friendly. He’d have expected her to get out more.
(It makes him wonder what she’d been like before the militia. Did she have friends? Was she in school? What would a town like Bruhl have been like to a girl like her?)
“You know—you don’t have to hang out here all the time, if you don’t want,” he says after a few days.
Isara sits up and looks over the cannon, startled. “Oh, I’m sorry—am I in the way?”
“No! Not at all.” He hurriedly shakes his head. “I’m sorry—I just wasn’t sure if you thought you were supposed to stay in here. As an operator.”
(He can certainly understand why she might be reluctant to let that tank out of her sight.)
“Oh, no, it’s not that,” Isara replies. “I like it in here.” She smiles down at him. “It’s nice to know I’m not bothering anyone.”
“What?” Kreis tilts his head, surprised. “Why do you think you’d bother anyone?”
“I—well—” She sounds as confused as he is. “You know—some of the squad members aren’t very comfortable around Darcsens.”
“Oh.”
He hadn’t even thought about it. He’s never had to think about it, not like she has every day. Kreis swallows awkwardly, wishing he could’ve stopped himself from asking at all.
“Plenty more of ‘em don’t care one way or the other though, do they?”
(He jumps, glancing behind him. In Leon’s brief silence he’d forgotten he’d be listening.)
Isara sighs. “That’s true, but… Sometimes I’d just rather not risk starting a fight at all.”
(Has she been in fights already?)
“…Fair enough,” Leon replies, turning back down to the rifle barrel he’s sanding. “Shame, though.”
“I don’t mind,” says Isara, more brightly. “I like you guys.”
Leon laughs. “Nah, a shame for everybody else. We’re hoggin’ ya.”
Isara giggles.
(How is he so good at this?)
Kreis looks away, down at his dissected shell on the workbench, embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Isara. I should have realized.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says.
He shakes his head. “I mean, I know how people can be. Kids at school used to tease me about it.”
“They did?”
Kreis cringes. In his head, this had had sounded like a less tactless thing to say. Now that he’s said it aloud he kind of wants to die.
“I mean, not like if I was Darcsen or anything.” he says, curling his fingers in the hair at the back of his neck. “I grew up around them, though. We lived on the border. My dad was born out in the Empire, and I was a factory kid. A lot of our friends were Darcsen families who’d fled to Gallia too.”
It had been a weird feeling. The childhood awareness that he was meant to be superior, no matter how emphatically every aspect of his life contradicted it. The oppression in the air, no matter how logically and passionately he knew not to breathe it in. It still makes him anxious.
He shrugs. “Kids used to say there’d been a mistake, and I should’ve been born one of them.” That he looked—smelled—close enough already.
(He’s not going to tell her how often he’d wished they were right. How strangely validating it had been not to fit with those kids. To be told, even if mockingly, that he fit elsewhere. To see his stupid unspoken little wish recognized, externalized.)
“I’m sorry,” says Isara.
She sounds genuine, and it makes his stomach squirm with guilt. He shakes his head again.
“Well, it isn’t much of an insult, is it?” he says. “It’s not like there’s anything wrong with being Darcsen.” It’s not like it hadn’t felt, in his clueless childhood, like a club he could watch from the outside but never join.
He can hear Isara shift nearer, dangle her legs off the tank, and he looks back up again. She smiles a little—more of a crooked grimace. It’s an odd expression to see on her face.
“I know it’s not really an insult,” she says, “but I know how it feels when people think it is one. Especially when you’re a kid.”
Kreis’s chest clenches. He gives her a tight little grimacing smile in return.
“I just wish I’d realized earlier how little sense it made,” he says. “I mean—the entire continent is dependent on Ragnite now. Working with it seems like a weird thing to look down on.”
“Cognitive dissonance, man,” puts in Leon, sagely. “Lot easier to find somebody to blame than it is to fix anything.”
Isara nods. “The Calamity makes it easy. It’s an excuse.”
Sobered, they all look down at their hands. She sighs.
“I do get why it would be,” she says. “Scientists have analyzed the rock from Calamity sites across Europa. They’ve found traces of Ragnite at every one. That part’s true.” Her mouth twists ruefully. “I think it’s understandable to be afraid of it if that’s all you really know.”
There were notes in Theimer’s work. He’d been having trouble early on convincing Gunther that the Ragnite engine was safe enough to get in a metal box with. Belgen Gunther would’ve seen the effects of Ragnide gas, heard of Ragnoline explosions. The healing properties were still theoretical then. We didn’t have this stuff when I was your age, you know, Kreis’s mother would say every time she lit up his smashed finger or scraped elbow with Ragnaid. And I got into way more trouble than you do.
No one is afraid these days. It’s ubiquitous. The nervous suspicion of Ragnite has stayed in the past, and yet the distrust and disgust toward its refiners is alive and well. It’s illogical. It drives Kreis crazy. He can’t imagine how much crazier it must drive Isara.
She shakes her head. “But the blame isn’t as simple as everyone wants it to be, and not many people are interested in hearing that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve read a lot about it,” says Isara. “We know what caused the destruction, but that’s all we know for sure. It could’ve been a freak accident or a natural disaster. Most of the sites were Darcsen settlements—there’s been no real physical evidence found that the Calamity was instigated by them at all.”
“And even if there was, who cares?”
Both of them turn back to look at Leon. He shrugs.
“That was, like, thousands of years ago, man. I mean—I’m not even anything like my parents. Everybody’s different.”
(It’s always kind of novel to hear how Leon’s mind works. It’s always completely unexpected, and yet completely logical. It’s never something Kreis would have thought himself.)
“Never made any sense to me, what we gotta keep on punishing every Darcsen for, when none of ‘em around now had any hand in blowing up anything.”
Isara smiles. “I guess that’s true.”
Leon chuckles as he lifts his barrel to look down. “Got slapped for asking when I was little, but never got an answer.”
She looks down at them, wistful. She hesitates, and then she sighs again.
“You’re right," she says, "but… Even so, I suppose I can’t help wanting to clear their name.”
Leon smiles back up at her. “That’s real cool of you. I like that.”
Kreis likes that about her too, but he can’t say it now. He chews on the inside of his cheek for a few seconds while he tries to figure out something new to say. He looks up.
“Where did you read about the Calamity, Isara?”
She brightens, sitting up straighter. “I’ve got a couple really interesting books that Welks sent me. He’s been finding some great old bookshops while he’s away at school.”
“In Randgriz, right?” Kreis asks, keen. “Do you know any names? I should go take a look on our next day off.”
“You’re not gonna ask her to go with you, man?”
Leon’s not within arm’s reach, so he pokes him in the shoulder blade with his rifle barrel. This is the third or fourth time in the last ten minutes that Kreis has had the thought: I have never been more embarrassed in my entire fucking life.
Isara doesn’t seem to notice. “I’ll ask Welks if he remembers—though I’m not sure he will. Maybe we should go look around ourselves.” She smiles. “It’d be fun.”
Kreis is still too surprised to speak. Leon pokes him again. “You bet!”
She glances at the Edelweiss, mouth twisted thoughtfully. “Some of my best books are old ones that Mr. Gunther had, though. Or my parents. They might be hard to find these days.”
“Oh.” It still takes Kreis a minute to process what she means every time she mentions her parents. “…Oh.”
“You still got ‘em?” asks Leon. “You’d already packed when they got your house, right?”
Oh, God, that’s right. Her town was occupied. She’d lost everything but what she’d brought here. Kreis looks down.
But she nods. “I’ve got my most important things with me.”
Her most important things, so many of them her father’s. His notes, his journals, his blueprints. The way she preserves his memory kind of reminds Kreis of the way that he would—and he can’t imagine how strange and alienating it must be to think of one’s father that way.
She smiles back at them. “If you’re interested—would you like to borrow any?”
They look at each other, and then back to her.
“You’d really lend us their books?” Leon asks. Kreis had had the same thought. To him these books sound like religious relics—he can’t imagine how much stronger the feeling would be for her.
Isara laughs. “I’m much more concerned about their tank, and you’ve been perfectly respectful with the Edelweiss.”
“Well—” Leon grins. “Yeah, then. For sure.”
“Thank you so much,” adds Kreis.
“I do still want to go out to the bookshops though,” she says. “It really does sound fun.”
“We’ll do it, then.” He gives her a nod and an earnest smile, until his face is so warm he has to look away.
They keep working in silence for another minute before Isara speaks again.
“Kreis, do you know where they are?”
He looks up. “Where what are?”
“Your friends, from your town. Do you know where they are now?”
They’d mostly cleared out after Bruhl, after Ghirlandaio. The Imperial border had been hit the quickest and the hardest in the last war. Kreis hasn’t been home since then either, but he’s sure they’d been right not to risk it.
He shakes his head, and he swallows.
Reading is a two-man operation. Kreis mans the page-turning, and Leon the cigarette. Long arm around Kreis’s neck, he reads over his shoulder, shifting the mouth end between them every minute or two.
(They share cigarettes most days. It’s cheaper, and Kreis dislikes the taste enough that it’s never worth it to try and smoke a whole one. But he sure is fucking neurotic enough to want to sometimes.)
Not all of Isara’s books are old, but this one—piecing together primary sources from the pre-Valkyrian era—had been out of print since before they were born. The pages are thin and some torn at the edges, fibers fraying. She thinks her father had purchased it secondhand before inking his name and address on the inside of the front cover. Kreis had gasped audibly when he opened it.
As they read it, he’s still lightheaded. A somberer shade of starstruck. He wouldn’t have trusted himself with the lit cigarette above it, but he couldn’t drop this book if he tried. In every spare moment he drinks in every word.
He was going to put it off for last. Save it for dessert. But Leon’s a dessert-first kind of guy.
This morning they were reading in the barrack, and tonight they’re out behind the hangar after work. They don’t pause to talk very often, but as they come across an underlined passage in the same ink from the inside cover, Kreis can’t help but mutter "Wow," under his breath.
“Never thought I’d get my hands on anything like this,” says Leon.
“Me either,” says Kreis, apparently with such reverent conviction that Leon chuckles around the cigarette in his mouth.
“Sure is lucky you met Isara, huh?”
It’s genuinely miraculous. The coincidence of coincidences. And Kreis is reveling in it, but it also has his stomach in knots.
“I just wish I were better at talking to her,” he admits.
He’s never really felt shy before. Awkward, certainly, but he’d never been the kind of person who avoided interaction altogether for the fear of it. But he’s also never wanted to interact with anyone so badly before. The entire concept of having a crush has kind of caught him off-guard—fluttering in his lungs before he’d really even understood what it felt like to have one.
Uncomfortably, he twists a lock of hair between his fingertips. “I feel like I’ve been so…weird.”
“Not a bit, man!”
“I haven’t been cool either though, have I?”
“So what?”
That’s easy for him to say. It’s not that Leon’s never been uncool—more that he’s not afraid of it. He accidentally steps on a lot of toes, but he always laughs it off and fixes it easy. It’s incredible. Kreis had never pictured himself jealous of the way someone doesn’t care.
He sighs and turns the page. At first he’d asked each time whether Leon had finished reading before he did, but it became clear pretty quickly that Leon reads much faster than he does.
(Kreis had always thought of his own slow fastidiousness as a virtue. His parents had called it that—they’d been proud of it. No one who works quickly could be doing as thorough a job, they’d tell him, and the thoroughness of the job is what’s important. He’s wiser than that. It’s not only okay to take his time, it’s better… The more he hangs around Leon, the less sure he is that any of that was true.)
It's still quicker to read together than for both of them to read in turn. And he has to finish these as quickly as possible, so he can talk to Isara about it as quickly as possible. Now that he’s gotten his foot in the door of a friendship, he’s just as desperate to keep going as he is stressed out about it. Why does every step of this have to be so difficult?
“I guess I’m being stupid,” he mumbles. “I mean—she’s a kid.”
“She’s not a kid, man,” says Leon, and he chuckles. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. No way you get your nerves together before you’re thirty.”
“Ha, ha.”
Kreis squirms as Leon knocks him on the temple with the knuckles of his cigarette hand.
“You’re thinkin’ too much,” he says. “You’re a great dude, dude. All you gotta do is be your regular self.”
“You think she’d like that?”
The pathetic vulnerability in asking it chokes him up with humiliation for a second. Leon graciously offers him the cigarette.
“You’re peas in a pod, man,” he says. “Why wouldn’t she?”
Because she seems to like you, maybe, and I’m nothing like you at all. Kreis coughs and grimaces. “I mean… It’s not like I’m…” A catch? “I’m not particularly good-looking or anything—"
“Nah, man, you’re cute!” Leon shakes him. “And don’t let nobody get on your ass about it. Girls like that. ‘Specially the nice ones.”
Sour, Kreis bites his lip. Leon isn’t any older than he is, and certainly not any wiser. But most of the time, it feels like it.
He tries to keep his next question in for a few seconds, but he’s just too curious. It’s never come up before.
“Hey, Leon?”
“Yeah?”
He swallows. “You ever been with a girl?”
Leon turns to stare at him, strangely incredulous. “What, you ain’t?”
Kreis shrugs. It doesn’t feel like a great time to admit he’s never even kissed one.
“For real?”
He scoffs weakly. He hadn’t expected this much—or, any—surprise. “What, do I really seem like somebody who has?”
This amuses Leon. He grins. “What d’you mean; do I?”
Kreis hesitates.
“I mean,” he says, with the meager confidence he can muster, “kind of. Yeah.”
Leon exhales. A breath of a chuckle.
“Well, guess so.”
“Like… A lot?”
“I dunno.” He shrugs. “Fooled around a little in school. Here and there afterward.”
“Oh.” The very notion of fooling around is alien to Kreis, who can barely wrap his head around that kind of intimacy with a theoretical girl he loved and was committed to. It’s a fascinating thought, but not really relevant. “Did you ever have a girlfriend, though?”
Leon brings the cigarette back to his own lips. “Not really.”
Kreis is a little bit comforted for the couple seconds it takes him to smoke, but then he exhales and goes on.
“I did shack up with a couple out west once. Just for a few months, but I guess that was kinda like having a girlfriend.”
This is more than alien; it’s completely fucking dumbfounding. “A couple of different women let you live with them?” asks Kreis, skeptical. No offense to Leon, but he doesn’t seem like the cohabitation type.
“Nah, a married couple. I was messing around with this old truck he had out back.”
Kreis laughs.
“What?”
“That’s how I figured out that trick with the engine—you remember I was showin’ you a couple weeks back? Man.” He sighs. “I wonder how they’re gettin' on, with the invasion and all. Hope there hasn’t been too much trouble over there.”
Leon’s moved past it, but Kreis is still stuck. “But—what, do you mean the husband too?”
He shrugs again. “Eh, y’know. There’s all sorts.”
Kreis doesn’t know. He’s lived his whole life in his rural town, where to his knowledge there are very few sorts. Leon’s a sort he’s never encountered before. Thinking about it that way… He supposes this idea shouldn’t surprise him.
It still does. He’s very aware all of a sudden of Leon’s arm around his neck, his chest against his shoulder.
Leon offers him the cigarette again.
“Do you do that a lot too?” Kreis asks. Sleep with men, he means, and he hopes Leon gets it because he doesn’t want to say it out loud.
Leon seems to get it, but he just shifts noncommittally. “I mean, I don’t go lookin’ or nothin'.”
Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean, with somebody like him. Kreis doubts he goes looking for girls either. Leon doesn’t seem like he goes looking for anything, and yet everything seems to find him.
“Anyhow, I don’t think it does any good worryin’ about how to make people like you,” says Leon. “Just keep livin’ your life, say what you wanna say, and when it happens, it happens.”
“But what if it—”
“—Man, it’ll happen.”
Kreis doesn’t exactly trust Leon’s perspective here, but it's still encouraging to hear. He leans back a little against Leon’s arm and sighs.
There’s a brief silence. He tries even harder than before to keep his next question in, but he still fails. He’s still too curious.
“What’s it like?”
Leon gives him a while to regret asking this. He brings the cigarette back over to his own lips, considering.
“I dunno, it’s okay,” he says.
From a guy who talks in extremes more often than not, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement. Kreis laughs in surprise. “What do you mean, okay?”
Leon shrugs.
“I mean, no unrealistic expectations, man,” he says. “This stuff gets talked up so much I spent ages wondering if I was doing it wrong.”
“Were you?”
“Nah.” He chuckles. “It’s just that there’s nothin’ transcendent about it. Nothin’ like that. It’s just, y’know… Something fun to do.”
“Huh,” says Kreis.
He curls the corner of the page between his thumb and forefinger, and he holds his breath for a ponderous little moment.
Fun.
Kreis could kick himself for asking.
He’s always been prone to thinking too hard. He’s the type that dwells on things until he understands them, and usually it’s physics or math. Now he’s turning Leon’s sexual exploits over in his mind like he might’ve done a particularly puzzling problem: the mechanics of it, the logistics.
It doesn’t mean anything, and he knows it. It’s not even his business at all. But it’s the unexpectedness of it all that he can’t help but wonder at. Now—somebody like that Jann, sure—
In his head he can hear Leon chuckle at him. At his provincial, unenlightened little thoughts. What d’you mean, ‘somebody like Jann?’
But they’d both know exactly what he meant. Kreis’s mental picture of homosexual desire had always been that distant, impotent infatuation. Jann mooning after Largo. Dallas pining for Alicia. It had always seemed…solitary. Hopeless. Indecent, but fundamentally chaste.
And so he’d never been judgmental about it, exactly. Found it a little pitiful, perhaps—but wasn’t like anything Kreis felt toward a girl himself would ever turn out much different, so, whatever. But that was one thing. It’s something else entirely to learn that men he knows, men he lives and works alongside, are actually having sex with each other. Leon!
He wants more information. But he can’t ask for it. There’s only so much he can ask without it sounding weird, and he kind of thinks he’s passed that point already. And furthermore, asking him what he could hadn’t even helped one bit with Isara, because Leon’s easy charisma is something Kreis simply cannot replicate. Leon just has to be himself—and that’s all the advice he can give.
The more he thinks about it, the less Kreis is sure he knows anyone attractive for whom attractiveness doesn’t come naturally. Not that it matters, of course, because there’s nobody else in the base—or for that matter, Europa—that he would even consider talking to about romance. So he’s shit out of luck either way.
He clenches his hands around Isara's books. All he can do is be himself, nerves and all.
Some boys hang out around the womens’ barracks pretty often, but Kreis isn’t one of them. He’d never expected to need to be over here for anything. He doesn’t think the girl who opens the door even knows who he is. But she goes to get Isara, who skips over to them with a smile on her face. “Kreis!”
Stop worrying. Stop worrying. Say what you want to say. “Hey, Isara.”
“How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know. I’m fine.”
Other than the dumb Leon fixation that’s true, and the dumb Leon fixation is the last thing in the world he wants to let on about to Isara. He thinks it would be poor form to say anything anyways—even if Leon doesn’t seem that bothered about secrecy himself. Maybe he just finds him trustworthy in particular.
“You?”
“Doing great.”
The other girl eyes them and walks away. Kreis and Isara look at each other in silence for a second before he remembers he’s here for a reason.
“I brought your books back,” he says, extending them forcefully, nervously over the threshold.
“Oh!” Isara takes them. “You’ve finished them already?”
He nods. “We read them together.”
She laughs a little at the thought. Kreis supposes it is a little silly.
He bows his head. “Thank you so much for trusting us,” he says. “With your father’s books, and General Gunther’s. I’m sure they mean a lot to you.”
“Oh, yes. It’s been really nice to have their things.”
Another girl clears her throat and, embarrassed, they both hop aside so she can pass. Isara closes the door behind her and joins Kreis on the wall just outside.
She glances over at him, and quickly back down at her books.
“Mr. Gunther used to tell me lots of stories,” she says. “I know he wanted me to know what my parents were like—as people, not just what’s in books.” Somewhat ruefully, she smiles. “He knew what it was like to be known by what’s in books.”
“…Mmhm.”
That’s how Kreis knows him. He’d laid eyes on him, but so had thousands of other people. Ever since that day he’d felt a connection to the man, but—how real was that, really? Was that feeling in the back of his mind anything more than an imaginary friend? A closeness with a character he’d built himself?
The last thing he expects is for Isara to express much the same feeling. She lifts her father’s book and thoughtfully turns it over. “But sometimes I wonder how different what I’m doing really is,” she says. “If everything I know I still know secondhand.”
Kreis exhales slowly and leans back against the wall.
“I guess we don’t really know anything more about anybody than what they tell us,” he muses. “Even if they’re there in front of us.” Every character in his life he’d built himself, hadn’t he? All he’s trying to do is get more material to work from.
“That’s kind of a sad thought,” says Isara.
“…Yeah. I guess it is.”
She doesn’t reply. After a few seconds Kreis glances back over to her. He can’t leave her with that.
“Reading the same books that they did, though… It really did feel like they were there in front of me. Your father and General Gunther.”
After a moment Isara looks back up at him. She smiles softly. “It does, doesn’t it?”
He’s glad to hear she feels that way too. He wasn’t sure if it was just his own unfamiliarity that did it. She knew General Gunther for a time, at least, and grew up in his house afterward. She had less room to fantasize. But Kreis hadn’t known them at all—or, well—
“…I met him once, actually,” he says before he can get too nervous to.
“Met who?”
Oh—he’d continued the conversation in his head, not aloud. “General Gunther.”
Isara’s mouth drops open. “You… You did?”
Kreis nods.
“Why wouldn’t you mention it?”
He glances away. “I mean—I barely met him. It was years and years ago—” Well, obviously. The man’s been dead for years and years, since not long after that. “I was a kid.”
“When was it?”
He remembers the date exactly. April 6th, 1924. He was nine years old. War was always present in their lives, as it was for everyone in Gallia, but until then he’d never seen it. Kreis holds his breath for a second, and then he sighs.
“I told you I grew up out east, right? On the border?”
“Oh. Yes, you did.”
“There was an Imperial base nearby, and after the Gallian invasion was over they kept using it to get supplies toward their front line down south. The Federation kept seizing it, and the Imperial army kept seizing it back. On and on. And then one time, they took cover in the town.”
Isara hugs her books to her chest. “Oh.”
“Both sides had tanks, and we didn’t have anything that could make a dent, so all we could do was hide. It went on for a whole day. A…lot of people died.”
EWI had ended, but hostilities never had. Gallia sat in between two giants. Towns like his were at risk of crossfire, and maintaining neutrality was more important than defending them. His cousin had joined up with the Feds not long after—just to help push the fighting from their doorstep, to feel like he could do something. Spending all his free time on armaments research had been more Kreis’s style.
“The army sent General Gunther and his unit in to push them back. It barely took an hour after he and the Edelweiss got there.”
“I remember that,” Isara says quietly.
“What—really?”
She nods. “He had to leave in the middle of the night. It woke us all up, and Martha was back at her house, so Welks made me pancakes after he was gone.”
Of course. She’d have been five or six, barely aware of Belgen Gunther’s renown or responsibilities. Only to the extent that she was saddened by his absence.
Isara looks up at him, eyes wide. “Is that why you were so interested in the Edelweiss?”
Kreis awkwardly scratches the back of his head.
“I mean… I’m sure I’d have found it interesting otherwise, but…that’s how I learned about it to begin with. And then I just tried to keep learning.”
“Tried?”
“Like you said, production was secret. There’s not much out there.” He shakes his head. “I got into tank design in general, and Ragnite engineering. One of my parents’ friends had a copy of Theimer’s theses that she let me read. It took me until getting enlisted and coming here to find my own copy.”
He won’t tell her this, but reading Theimer’s philosophy had spooked him. The man had clearly struggled with his role in the war. The ethics and necessity of mass destruction. Looking down his own term of service, Kreis had felt all those words come back to him and settle on his chest.
Ragnite is wasted on war. There’s so much to be done with the stuff, and so little of it. Kreis can remember the first time his mother showed him how a lightbulb worked, that tiny blue spark that burns the filament gold. He remembers the first huge chandelier he’d ever screwed sockets into, lit up aloft on the factory floor. The first little lamp he’d assembled himself.
He loves creation. He’d applied for R&D because it felt like a better use of his talents than the battlefield: he could die on the front line, or he could make something, and he knew he could. He could defend the country he loves. And maybe, someday, what he’d learned could be of use in a more peaceful world.
It’s the perspective that had kept Theimer going.
“It took me ages to find out that the Edelweiss was his work,” he says. It was always Gunther’s tank, as if he were the man who built it. For years Kreis had had no reason to believe otherwise. He’d always understood that Darcsens were discriminated against, but at that age it had been hard for him to picture beyond schoolyard insults. The institutional scale of it, the subtleties.
Europa revels in its progress, but it looks down upon those it comes from. It still siloes them in ironworks and factories, profits from their work in the same breath it scorns them for it. The more he’d learned the more frustrated he’d become.
“I just wish he was given more credit,” he says.
“It’s a shame," Isara replies. "But I also don’t think renown matters very much. It’s nice to be recognized, but it isn’t everything.”
A good perspective for a mechanic, Kreis supposes. Darcsen or not, he’s starting to realize that other mechanics are the only ones who notice when their job’s done well.
Isara sighs. “Everyone knew who Mr. Gunther was, but he…he was sad.”
“He was?”
She nods deeply. “Sometimes that’s what I remember the most about him.” It takes her a couple seconds to realize what an awful thought that is. She can’t leave him with that. “But he kept going anyways, and he did what he could to help others. That’s what means the most to me.”
“Yeah.” He swallows. “Yeah.”
Kreis is grateful too, that he could carry on. He’s alive because Belgen Gunther could carry on. Because Theimer could carry on.
He’s going to carry on himself.
They’ve brought back another tank from Fouzen. It’s the last thing Kreis had expected them to find there, and they’d found so much else there that he feels a little sick with himself for being so interested. The Shamrock is an engineering marvel, its pilot the sort of man whose brain Kreis would love to pick.
Leon seems to be less concerned with holding back. He’s over at the tank across the room, all but hanging off the guy. “You really built this yourself.”
Zaka chuckles. “Modified is a better word, I think.”
“Then you modified the fuck out of it, dude! These are Imperial parts?”
“Most of ‘em.”
“That’s so metal.” Kreis can see the excitement in Leon’s movements as he reaches up to inspect the turret. “Where’d you learn to weld, man? This is insane—"
“Leon’s having fun, isn’t he?” says Isara quietly from behind him.
Only Kreis is close enough to hear. He glances back up at the Edelweiss, where she’s curled knees to chest on top. He chuckles softly, somberly. “He’s good at that.”
Kreis knows Leon had lived in Fouzen for a while. He’d gone to school there as a teenager. What had happened there had to have affected him. But they’ve also got a new hope now—Leon’s always been the kind of guy to focus on that. Kreis hadn’t really thought about it until now, but he isn’t sure he’s ever met anyone more hopeful in his life.
(It’s hard to tell, though, if it’s a well-adjusted kind of hopeful or a desperate one. Maybe a bit of both.)
Still sad-eyed, Isara smiles. “That’s good. We need it.”
“Mmhm.”
She pauses.
“Are you doing alright, Kreis?”
He’s not. He doesn’t know if anyone he knows was there, and he’s not sure anyone can find out. He’s not even going to know who’s still alive until the dust settles—he hopes they’re lying low enough that he can’t learn.
But that doesn’t matter. Isara saw it. She’s felt things he never will—never can. “Are you okay?”
She weakly broadens her smile, but she can’t keep it up.
After a second Kreis removes his gloves and reaches into his pocket. He breaks off the less melted square of chocolate from the end of his bar, and he climbs up on top of the Edelweiss to hand it to her.
The gesture had felt a little pathetic, but as she takes the chocolate from him she looks more than ever like she might cry. Kreis folds his legs under him and leans closer against the cannon barrel between them.
“I know there’s not much I can do,” he says. “I… I know it must feel so much more overwhelming, considering…”
“That I’m Darcsen?” She puts the chocolate in her mouth and keeps it there for a long time. Letting it melt. “But… Am I, really?”
Kreis furrows his brow in surprise. Isara looks out over the hangar.
“I always knew that’s what I was, of course,” she says. “Nobody lets you forget it. But the more I meet other Darcsens here, the more I feel like I don’t understand what it means to be one.”
“What do you mean?”
She shakes her head.
“I’ve felt it for a while. I always spent a lot of time reading books, trying to figure out what my culture was supposed to be, because there was never anyone to learn it from. Mr. Gunther tried to pass on what he knew, but… There was only so much he knew to begin with. And then he was gone.”
Mirthlessly, she laughs.
“When you told me how you knew Darcsen families growing up, how close you were to them… I was jealous.”
He’s stunned. Of all the things he’d regretted saying that day, he hadn’t expected that to be the one that got to her. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I… I didn’t mean…”
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. I always know that, Kreis.” She sighs. “I think it’s something I have to figure out on my own. Or with the others, now that I have the opportunity to. I mean—the only part of being Darcsen that I’ve truly experienced is the discrimination. The fact that it made me different. And that’s just—it’s…”
It’s heartbreaking. She swallows thickly.
“I don’t want that to be all it means to me.”
She keeps looking out across the room. There’s not much he can say to help, and he hasn’t got any more chocolate, but he’s going to keep sitting with her until she wants him gone.
“I was born in Fouzen,” she says after a moment.
He probably could have put this together, considering his biographical understanding of her father’s life, but he hadn’t. He breathes in slowly. “Oh.”
“I don’t remember it at all. I was still a baby when my parents died, and until this week I hadn’t been back.” She shakes her head. “If Mr. Gunther wasn’t there to take me in, I… I could’ve died in that camp. My parents and I, all of us. And I…”
Isara takes a deep breath.
“It makes me wonder about their death.”
Theimer was long dead by the time Kreis had learned what had become of him, but he’d struggled to process it anyways. The idea that someone so monumental could die in a moment so mundane. “It was a car accident, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
The dark expression doesn’t leave her face, nor the dark tone her voice.
“…What, you… You think someone engineered it?”
It’s not implausible. Theimer had open, published misgivings about the business of war. He had the ears of powerful players. And, to many, he had deceit in his blood. Could he have been seen as a threat? A target?
Isara bites her lip. Kreis stares at her.
“I never knew much about it,” she admits softly. “What kind of accident, what the circumstances were. No one ever told me, and I never went looking. It was always easy enough to accept as just…bad luck.”
Easy. He looks down at his folded knees. He supposes the thought of a mundane death might be comforting, to someone so at risk of a violent or tragic one.
“I’d wondered before, but…” She swallows thickly. “I suppose I’d just…never truly understood how meaningless our lives were. To so many people. Enough for this to happen.”
Kreis sighs. He’s glad to hear she was always well loved, but he doesn’t envy her the weight of this now.
She rubs at the corners of her eyes.
“…I guess it doesn’t matter,” she says. “There wouldn’t be any evidence anymore. And even if there were… It’s… It’s like the camp. No matter what happened, there’s no bringing them back.”
“…I suppose,” says Kreis.
Weakly, wetly, she laughs. “This is the tenet I always found the most difficult. Don’t retaliate.”
It doesn’t come naturally to someone raised outside the Darcsen culture, and not even to many raised within. Kreis knows that well enough.
“I always knew I should try,” says Isara. “And I did. But Welks was retaliating for me, and that was the only thing that worked, and I… I was grateful for him, but it always made me feel…weak.” She smiles fondly. “And so I started to learn about the Edelweiss. My father built it, after all, so… I figured it must be okay.”
It's sweet. Kreis smiles too. “I’m glad Lieutenant Gunther was there for you.”
“Me too.” Isara flushes a little. “But I worried about him a lot. I tried to make him a good-luck doll when I was really young, even. Seven or eight—I couldn’t sew very well. I don’t know if he kept it.”
“Do you mean those Darcsen charms?” Kreis approximates the size with his hands. “The little dolls?”
She blinks. “You know of them?”
“I think my dad has one of those.”
An old one, given to him before his family crossed into Gallia, by a friend he never saw again. He doesn’t talk about his childhood much. When his hand’s in his pocket sometimes his thumb moves over it, worrying.
“Mr. Gunther kept one too,” says Isara. “He told me my mother made it for him.” She laughs quietly. “He said my father was no good at sewing either.”
Kreis laughs with her. Softly, tentatively, but genuinely. And he looks over to her, heartened by the more relaxed look on her face.
“I don’t know if he kept it,” he says. “But I’ve seen Lieutenant Gunther have a lot of really incredible luck.” He smiles at Isara, in a way he hopes is close to the way she smiles at him. That encouragement is what he wants her to feel. “Maybe some of that’s down to you.”
Isara reaches under the barrel between them and grasps his hand. Kreis’s heart leaps to his swollen throat.
She looks away, though, down at her free hand curled around her knees. “I’m sorry for…all of that,” she mumbles. “I was just… I don’t know—"
“Don’t,” says Kreis. “It’s fine.”
She leans against the barrel. “Thank you. For listening.”
“Always.”
Looking back out over the hangar, Isara smiles.
“I was lucky. I always knew there were people I mattered to—people who weren’t Darcsen like I was. I grew up with them. It took me a while to understand that lots of us never meet someone like that.” She lowers her eyes. “And… That would feel so hopeless, wouldn’t it? Like no one on the outside could ever help or care. So why bother reaching out?”
He has to admit he’s rarely known anyone who speaks out for peace as simply and openly as Isara does. Activism gets you killed, and moving on is safer than arguing. It had never occurred to him that it could be naivety rather than bravery.
“It really means so much to me that I know that people care,” she says. “Even when some don’t, some do. Especially today… I’m so grateful to know that there’s a way forward.”
Kreis knows there’s not much he can do. But it comforts him now to know that what he can do really means something. He won’t say it, he won’t make this about his own feelings. But he will squeeze her hand.
She squeezes back.
Leon keeps looking up at the Shamrock for several minutes after everyone leaves. Silent, gravely rapt.
Kreis thinks he understands the feeling. The responsibility for something so precious, so much bigger than yourself. The Shamrock had been built piece by stolen piece in secret in an Imperial labor camp, and now it’s up to Leon Schmidt to take care of it. To take care of their country with it.
He comes up behind Leon’s shoulder. “You okay?”
Leon doesn’t move for a while, and then he turns and tugs his gloves off.
“I’m going for a smoke,” he says. “Wanna come?”
“Sure.”
Kreis figures even Leon needs it sometimes too.
They’re working through the holiday.
Last summer, Kreis had barely even noticed the Festival of Spirits. He’d barely noticed it since he was a kid. It was nice to have a day off, but the romance of it all didn’t really touch him. Most of his colleagues were adults with families. His old friends from school were studying elsewhere. It had been years since he knew anyone who’d be interested in him, let alone anyone he’d hope would be.
Today, Isara struggles to push open the hangar door one-handed, boxes stacked in the other. He leaps up from his workbench to help.
“Thank you!” She smiles brightly. “I brought you something.”
Kreis’s heart hammers. He opens his mouth, but can’t get any further than that. And then she waves Leon over from the other side of the room, and he’s glad he didn’t.
“Both of you, I mean.” She shifts her two boxes and opens the top one.
It looks delicious and smells even better. Distracted from his embarrassment instantly, Kreis takes a deep, blissful breath.
“Oh, wow—where did you get these?”
“They’re chocolate sweet buns,” she says. “Alicia helped me make them—it’s a recipe from the bakery in our town.”
He hasn’t had anything like this since his last day off. The militia tends to be more practical with its menu, and even in the city things are starting to get tight with rationing. “You made these?”
“I thought you’d like them.”
Leon whistles from over Kreis's shoulder, tucking his gloves in his pocket. “These for us?”
“Yes!” Isara sets her boxes down carefully on the nearest bench. “Happy Festival.”
“…Both of us?”
Kreis had shared his confusion, and he’s grateful Leon had been the one to ask. Surely they’re misunderstanding. But as he glances toward Leon, he can’t help but wonder—is that misunderstanding something he’d be fine with?
It had been a less present concern than the other, but ever since Leon had mentioned his married couple, Kreis had been even more baffled by their part in it than his. What committed couple would take a stranger into their bed, no matter how young and charming? Was that not antithetical to the entire idea?
(He’d never even considered it until now. If a girl he loved wanted someone else, would he?)
Isara hears the implication, though, and she hurriedly shakes her head before his mind can spin out any more. “It’s an old holiday,” she says, very quickly. “Originally gifts were given to everyone we cared about, not just boyfriends. And I think that’s much nicer, don’t you?”
Kreis imagines this isn’t the first time she’s given this speech today. He feels kind of bad for making her give it again. “Yeah, it is.”
More confidently, she gives them a broad smile. “And I wanted to say thank you. Everything you’ve been doing for me.”
They all glance toward the corner she’s tucked her airplane in, covered with a sheet during the day. Nobody seems to look twice. There’s always something weird going on in here.
“You don’t have to do that,” says Kreis. God knows he’s getting more out of this arrangement than she is.
“Kreis, I want to.”
“And I want one of those.” Leon reaches around him to lift an oozing chocolate bun from the middle of the box. “Turning down a gift ain’t polite, KC.”
“Hey—I’m not—"
Isara giggles. “Those will be yours, then.” She lifts the box and hands it to him, then picks up the second to offer to Kreis. “There’s no need to eat them right away, if you don’t want to.”
“Oh—” He shakes his head, flushed. “No, I do…”
He picks up a warm, fragrant bun and tears into it, the melted chocolate oozing over the bread.
“Thank you,” he says.
She beams. “You’re welcome.”
By the time she leaves to deliver more gifts, Leon’s tucked away the rest of his own box. Kreis picks out a second bun from his own as he wanders back over. He chews thoughtfully.
“I should’ve gotten her something,” he says when he swallows.
“What d’you mean, man?” Leon chuckles. “That’s for girls.”
“You heard her, though,” Kreis insists. “She doesn’t see it that way. She’s giving presents to all her friends.” If he doesn’t give her anything, will she consider her friendship unreciprocated?
Leon nudges him encouragingly. “Next year we’ll know, then.”
Kreis takes another bite. Next year is such an odd thought. Will the war be over by then? Even if it is, will it be peaceful? Do they even have a chance at winning?
Would he still talk to Isara after it’s all over? Would he still talk to Leon, even? Or would he just go back home and slot himself back into his comfortable niche, and go on as he would have gone on before it all?
He stuffs the last bite into his mouth and reaches for another bun.
When she comes tearing back into the hangar half an hour later, the last one’s in his mouth. He hurriedly tries to swallow. Leon rolls out from under the Shamrock as he does.
“Isara?”
Breathlessly, she unfolds something on the top of the Ragnoline crate between them.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a smoke round for the Edelweiss. Do you think we can make these before tomorrow?”
The blueprints are hand-drawn, the notes in her writing. “When did you design this?” asks Kreis. He sucks the chocolate off his fingers before lifting a lined notebook page to look below. “Isara—this is incredible!”
“I’ve been working on the idea for a while, but I didn’t expect to need them so urgently. I can’t do it alone.” She looks up at them, and the fierce expression on her face takes him aback. Captivates him. “Can you help?”
“Of course,” says Kreis at once. He doesn’t know or care whether or not that’s true. “Anything you need.”
He hadn’t gotten her anything, but he’ll make her something now.
Isara smiles.
It takes Squad 7 longer than expected to return from the coast. Kreis is asleep when they arrive. They’d worked all night on Isara’s smoke rounds, and he’d put his circadian rhythm out of whack: for years of school and years of work he’d accustomed himself to a routine. Until now he’d kept it. Staying up like that had wiped him out.
He's free to take a nap, anyways. There’s not all that much to do while the squad’s gone, both of their tanks with them. He won’t touch Isara’s plane without her oversight. There’s always more brainstorming to do, but brainstorming isn’t much use when his brain’s barely working. Sleeping is the most useful thing he can do.
(And when he’s asleep, he’s not worrying.)
Leon, on the other hand, has always been less sensitive to schedules than he is. When Kreis wakes up in the late afternoon, he’s sitting on the floor against the lower barrack. Waiting.
“Hey—!” Kreis blinks, startled. “How long have you been there?”
“Not that long,” says Leon. He glances back toward him, and Kreis reaches blindly for his glasses to try and see the look that’s on his face.
Even when he can see, he can’t figure it out. It’s not like Leon always smiles—but even when he doesn’t, there’s still a spirited brightness in the way he holds his face. This look is unusually blank, ominously flat. Kreis’s stomach turns over.
Leon opens his mouth, but it takes him a second to speak. “Listen, man…”
“What is it?”
He hesitates again. Kreis has never seen him so cautious, and that alone makes him more nervous than anything.
“Did it not work?” he asks, gut plummeting. “The smoke?” They hadn’t had time to test as thoroughly as they’d like. They certainly couldn’t account for the shoreline conditions. It had always been a gamble. How could he promise Isara they could do it? How much of Squad 7 had been depending on that cover? How many of them had been—
“Nah,” says Leon. He smiles faintly. “It worked. The smoke worked good.”
“Oh—thank God.” Kreis flops back into his pillow, sighing. “You were scaring me.”
He’s so relieved that he forgets to be worried about anything else for the several seconds until Leon figures out how to keep going. And then the helpless tone of his voice turns Kreis’s blood cold again.
“But—look, KC…”