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The sandbags behind their backs scratched through the fabric of their uniforms, rough and sun-bleached and permanently stained with dust and old blood. They were stacked high enough to form a wall, patched and repatched with mismatched canvas, some seams held together by thread that did not even match the original color. Every bag smelled faintly of gunpowder and damp earth and sweat, the permanent scent of a place people were never meant to live in but had been dying in for months.
Castorice leaned her weight against them and felt the dull ache in her shoulder pulse in time with her heartbeat. Under her combat shirt and vest, thick bandages wrapped from her collarbone down her upper arm, hidden except for the white edge that peeked just above the rim of her vest. The medics had said the shrapnel had missed the artery by less than an inch. She could still feel it sometimes, not as pain, but as a memory her body refused to forget.
Beside her, close enough that their sleeves brushed whenever one of them shifted, Aglaea sat with her rifle across her lap in a loose, practiced grip. Her finger rested straight along the frame, not quite touching the trigger but near enough that it would take less than a heartbeat to move. Her helmet sat a little crooked, because she kept pushing it back to wipe sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, which only smeared the dust and soot more thoroughly across her skin. A strip of white bandage wrapped around her left thigh beneath the torn fabric of her combat pants, and another looped neatly around her right forearm, the gauze already marked by a small brown bloom where the wound beneath was still seeping slowly.
They had been in that position for almost an hour. Leaning against the wall of sandbags, boots planted in the packed dirt of the dugout floor, bodies heavy with fatigue that went deeper than muscle. Above them, the sky was starting to change from the harsh white glare of late afternoon into something softer. The sun sank toward the distant ruins at the edge of the horizon, sliding behind the jagged teeth of collapsed buildings and skeletal trees, painting the smoke that rose from somewhere beyond the frontline in colors that would have been beautiful in any other life.
Beyond their little shelter, the world remained loud even when it tried to be quiet. Far down the trench line, someone shouted for more ammunition. Closer still, there was the clink and scrape of metal on metal as a machine gun team adjusted their weapon. In the distance, rifle fire crackled in short bursts like dry branches breaking in a storm. Occasionally, a deeper boom rolled across the fields from artillery, heavy and distant, followed by a thread of new smoke that spiraled upward and joined the smudged veil already hanging over everything.
Here, behind the wall of sandbags, the sound was muted, as if the earth itself was trying to give them a fragile pocket of calm. The air carried the bitter tang of explosives and the metallic taste of old blood. Mixed in with it were traces of other scents that did not belong on a battlefield: wild grass crushed under boots, the faint sweetness of some stubborn weed that had survived near the trench wall, the ghost of cigarette smoke from a squad that had passed by an hour ago. Somewhere farther along the line, someone laughed, too loudly and too quickly, the sound wobbling with nerves.
Aglaea shifted slightly and pressed the heel of her boot more firmly into the ground. The movement tugged at the bandage on her thigh, and she winced before she managed to smooth her face into something neutral again. Castorice noticed anyway.
“Does it hurt more when you move?” Castorice asked without turning her head.
Aglaea let out a small breath that might have been a laugh or a sigh. “It hurts when I breathe,” she replied quietly. “So moving is just a different kind of argument with my body.”
Castorice glanced at her then. Aglaea’s lips were curved in something that vaguely resembled a smirk, but her eyes gave her away. They were tired, rimmed with red from dust and lack of sleep, and filled with a steady, stubborn light that had not yet gone out despite everything that had tried to extinguish it.
“You should be in the medical tent,” Castorice said.
“So should you,” Aglaea answered immediately. “You bleed through your shoulder bandage every time you sneeze.”
“I don't sneeze that often.”
“You do when the dust starts blowing.”
“Then I will stop breathing when the dust starts blowing.”
“You would still find a way to be stubborn about it.”
Their voices stayed low, more like murmurs than full speech. They had learned to talk like that, half out of caution and half out of habit. Sound carried strangely over trenches and through broken walls. The enemy might not understand the words, but they would understand anything that sounded like life.
Castorice looked out past the edge of the sandbags. From this angle, she could see the jagged outline of no man’s land: a torn patch of earth between their trench and the enemy’s, scarred with craters that collected muddy water, littered with twisted scraps of metal and the splintered remains of trees that had been shattered and burned. A boot lay abandoned near a crater, half buried in mud, its laces undone. Farther out, something that had once been a vehicle lay on its side, the metal hull peeled open like torn fabric, blackened at the edges where fire had eaten it.
The sky above that wreckage was changing. The sun was lower now, and its light slid across the land at an angle that made every broken thing cast a longer, deeper shadow. The smoke drifting in from the ruined city beyond the hills caught the light in shades of orange and gold and dirty rose, and the clouds above held streaks of purple that looked like bruises slowly blooming across the sky.
The first time they had been sent to this frontline, Castorice had thought the sunsets were the most cruel part of it. The world would bleed into soft colors, as if it were trying to apologize for something it had already allowed to happen. The first evening, she had stared at the sky and felt angry, because it seemed wrong that something so gentle could exist above a place that hurt so much. Now, many weeks later, she had run out of energy for anger. The sunsets still hurt, but in a quieter way, like a memory of something she could not quite remember ever having had.
“What are you thinking?” Aglaea asked.
Castorice watched a distant plume of smoke curl upward and then slowly unravel into the air. “I'm thinking that this sky doesn't belong here,” she said. “It's wasting itself on us.”
Aglaea tilted her head back against the sandbags and let her eyes follow the long streaks of color. “Maybe it's the other way around,” she replied. “Maybe we are wasting ourselves under it.”
Castorice turned at that. “Don't talk like that,” she said quietly.
“Like what?”
“Like you are already gone.”
Aglaea blinked slowly, then turned her head as well so they faced each other. Their helmets almost knocked together, and both of them pulled back by instinct, then leaned in again, settling into a distance that was close enough to see the small details on each other’s faces, but not close enough to brush noses.
“I'm still here,” Aglaea said. Her voice was soft, but not fragile. “We both are. For now, that's enough.”
Castorice studied her, cataloguing every small thing without meaning to. The faint scar that cut through Aglaea’s right eyebrow, pale against her skin, left by a training accident years before they were ever sent to the front. The way a smear of dirt had skipped across the bridge of her nose, almost like a fingerprint. The half-healed cut at the corner of her mouth, where a piece of shrapnel had grazed her face two weeks ago. The way her freckles had faded under layers of dust and smoke, but were still visible if you knew where to look.
Her gaze dropped briefly to Aglaea’s hands. The knuckles of her right hand were scraped raw, the skin broken in places where she had punched a wall in the bunker after receiving news that half their original unit had been wiped out in a shelling. Castorice remembered that night clearly. She had stood in the doorway and watched Aglaea hit the concrete again and again until her fists bled, until she finally sagged against the wall and slid down to sit on the floor, shaking silently. Castorice had walked over then and wrapped Aglaea’s hands in her own, pried the fingers open, and cleaned the broken skin with careful, clumsy tenderness, because the medic had been busy and because she could not stand to watch Aglaea break herself more when the war was already doing such an efficient job of it.
The bandage on Aglaea’s forearm now was from a different day, but the memory stacked itself on top of every other one, building a small, private history that existed only between them.
“Does it still hurt?” Castorice asked, nodding toward the bandaged arm.
Aglaea flexed her fingers as if testing them. “Less than it did yesterday,” she answered. “More than it will tomorrow, if we get that far.”
Castorice lowered her eyes. The promise they had not yet spoken hovered between them like a drawn breath waiting to be released.
They had known each other before the war. Not as closely as they did now, but enough to recognize each other’s footsteps in the barracks corridor, enough to share jokes in the mess hall, enough to spar in training with a ferocity that never quite masked the way they pulled their punches at the last second. Aglaea had laughed more back then, freely and easily, with a sound that had made other people turn their heads. Castorice had always pretended she did not notice how the sound tugged at something in her chest.
Then the war had shifted closer, and their names had appeared on the same deployment list, and suddenly they were no longer trainees in clean uniforms but soldiers in gear that never fully dried between rainstorms and night patrols. They had shared everything since then: rations and water, foxholes and watch shifts, cigarettes traded for chocolate bars, blankets patched together on freezing nights in the dugout when the wind cut through every seam in their clothes. They had shared moments of terror that pressed them so close together they could feel each other’s heartbeat through layers of armor, and they had shared moments of stillness like this one, when the world’s violence retreated just far enough to allow them to breathe, even if that breath carried the taste of smoke.
They had not shared the one thing that mattered most.
Aglaea turned back toward the changing sky. “Do you remember the first time we fired live rounds in training?” she asked.
Castorice allowed herself a small, tired smile. “You mean when you almost shot the instructor’s hat off because you refused to admit your shoulder was shaking?”
Aglaea huffed, which might have been a stifled laugh. “He shouldn't have worn such a ridiculous hat in the first place,” she said. “It was a hazard.”
“It was regulation.”
“It was still a hazard.”
“You are a hazard.”
Aglaea’s lips curved a little more. “You didn't think that when I took that bullet meant for you last month.”
Castorice’s smile faded, and her throat tightened briefly. “Don't do that again,” she said.
“Save your life?”
“Put yourself in front of me.”
“There was no time to think about it. I just moved.”
“That is the problem,” Castorice replied, turning fully toward her now. “You never think about what happens to you.”
Aglaea met her gaze steadily. “If something has to happen to someone,” she said, “I would rather it be me than you.”
Castorice’s hands curled into fists on her thighs, the leather of her gloves creaking softly. “You don't have the right to decide that,” she answered.
“Neither do you.”
They held each other’s eyes until the tension in the air felt almost as dense as the packed dirt beneath their boots. Somewhere further along the trench, a sergeant barked an order, and a group of soldiers hurried past at a crouch, rifles raised. The moment stretched, then slowly eased as the sounds of movement faded again.
Aglaea exhaled and let her head rest back against the sandbags. “We could argue about this until the war ends,” she said. “Or until it ends us.”
Castorice swallowed the dozens of responses that rose to her lips. She wanted to tell Aglaea that her life mattered more than any mission, more than any frontline, more than any shredded map of territory gained and lost. She wanted to say that she had memorized the way Aglaea’s voice dropped when she was afraid and trying to hide it, and the way her hands shook after a firefight until Castorice took them and held them steady. She wanted to confess that every time the alarm sounded and they were ordered out of the bunkers, her first thought was not about the enemy but about where Aglaea was, if she was near, if she could get to her.
Instead she said, “We shouldn't waste the little time we have on arguing.”
Aglaea’s eyes softened. “Then what should we do with it?” she asked.
The answer trembled just behind Castorice’s teeth. She could feel the weight of it pressing against her tongue. To say it would be to step off a ledge she had been standing on for months. The war had already taken so much control from her; this felt like the one thing she could choose.
She looked at Aglaea, really looked at her, and the sky behind her seemed to pull itself into sharper focus around the edges of her silhouette. The fading light traced a thin line along Aglaea’s jaw and caught in her lashes, making them gleam. The bruising around her forearm bandage and the dried streak of blood near her temple told their own story of how close she had come to not being here at all.
“If we make it through this,” Castorice began, and her voice came out rougher than she intended.
Aglaea’s gaze snapped to her immediately. “Through this battle?” she asked. “Through this week?”
“Through this war,” Castorice said quietly.
Aglaea blinked once, slowly. The rifle on her lap lay forgotten for a moment, her hands resting still on the metal. The sounds of distant gunfire seemed to recede, as if the world were holding back long enough to let these words exist.
“If we make it through this war,” Castorice said, “walk out of it alive, with enough of ourselves left to still be called human, I want us to promise something.”
Aglaea’s throat moved as she swallowed. “What kind of promise?” she asked, and the careful evenness of her tone betrayed how much effort it took to keep it steady.
Castorice turned her body more fully toward her, shoulder brushing against Aglaea’s, the contact sending a small, warm shock through both of them despite the layers of fabric and armor between their skin. “We don't know where they will send us,” she said. “When this ends, they might scatter us to different cities, different units, different lives. They might ask us to go back to who we were before, even though we will never be those people again. I don't want to trust chance with this. I don't want to leave our lives up to luck after everything else that has already been decided for us.”
Aglaea listened without interrupting, her eyes holding Castorice’s with an intensity that made it difficult to breathe.
“I want us to promise,” Castorice continued, “that if we walk away from this alive, we will find each other. No matter how long it takes. No matter how far we are sent. No matter how many times they tell us to move on. I want us to promise that we will not let the war be the only place where we existed together.”
The last words trembled on the edge of something larger, something she still could not quite bring herself to name. A stray bullet whined high overhead, followed by a distant shout, but nothing immediate broke through the fragile quiet around their little section of trench.
Aglaea’s lips parted slightly. For a moment, she looked like she might make a joke, deflect, turn it into something lighter, but the look in Castorice’s eyes stopped her. There was too much laid bare there: fear and hope and a tenderness that had no place among sandbags and rifles and muddy boots, and yet somehow fit there perfectly.
“You think we will be allowed that kind of future?” Aglaea asked. Her voice was almost a whisper. “You think we will recognize ourselves when this is over?”
“I'm not sure,” Castorice admitted. “I'm not sure of anything anymore. The world changes every hour. Maps redraw themselves with every artillery strike. People disappear faster than we can learn their names. I don't know who I will be by the time this ends. I only know that I want you to be there, whatever version of me survives.”
Aglaea looked away briefly, toward the horizon. The sun had almost reached the line where land met sky now. Its light was softer, more desperate, stretching out in long rays that painted the clouds in molten copper and deep rose. The ruined skyline in the distance cut jagged silhouettes into that glow, like teeth biting into something holy.
“I'm afraid,” she said, still watching the sunset. “I'm afraid that if I promise this, I'm promising something I have no right to promise. We might not live. We might not find each other. We might be changed so much we don't want to be found.”
Castorice swallowed and followed her gaze to the horizon. “We already changed so much,” she said. “Yet I still recognize you. Every time you walk into a room, even if it is full of people wearing the same uniform, I know it is you before I see your face. I know it from the way the air reacts to you. That will not disappear.”
Aglaea’s fingers twitched on the rifle, then slowly loosened. She lifted her right hand and stared at it for a moment, as if surprised it still belonged to her. The knuckles were gouged and bruised, faint scars crisscrossing over older injuries. A thin line of dried blood traced from a small cut near the base of her thumb where a piece of jagged metal had caught her during the last advance.
Carefully, as if fighting through an invisible barrier, she turned her hand and extended it slightly, palm up, between them.
“If we live,” she said, her eyes returning to Castorice’s, “I will look for you. I will not stop. If they send me north and you go south, I will still find a way. If they tell me to forget everything that happened here, I will refuse. If they ask who I am waiting for, I will say your name and not apologize for it.”
Castorice’s heart thudded so hard against her ribs that for a moment she thought Aglaea might hear it over the distant gunfire. The promise was not a confession, not quite, but it sat so close to one that the difference felt almost meaningless.
She looked at Aglaea’s open hand, battle-worn and trembling just slightly. Then she took her own hand off her rifle and placed it in Aglaea’s palm, fingers closing around hers. The contact was solid and grounding, skin against skin through the thin fabric of their gloves, warmth bleeding through the layers.
“If we die,” Castorice said, barely louder than a breath, “I will still look for you, whatever comes after this. I will not let this be the only life where we meet.”
Aglaea smiled then, a fragile, broken thing that somehow still held more light than the sky. “You always have to outdo me,” she murmured.
“I told you,” Castorice replied, lips curling faintly. “You are a hazard. Someone has to be prepared.”
Their fingers tightened around each other’s just a little more. The sunset continued its slow descent, and the world around them resumed its harsh rhythm. A radio crackled near the next bend in the trench. Someone called for a medic. A flare shot up in the distance, staining the darkening sky with harsh white light before drifting back down like a dying star.
They did not let go.
After a while, their hands relaxed slightly, but their palms remained pressed together, each of them unwilling to surrender that small, defiant touch. The bandages on their arms and shoulders tugged when they moved, reminding them of every moment that had almost ended differently, every wound that could have been fatal if the angle had been only a little different, if the timing had shifted by seconds.
“Do you ever think about who you were before all this?” Aglaea asked suddenly.
Castorice considered the question. “Sometimes,” she said. “It feels like I am remembering someone else’s life. She had clean clothes and slept in a bed that didn't move when artillery fell. She thought the worst thing that could happen was failing an exam.”
Aglaea huffed softly. “I wanted to be a painter,” she said again, echoing what she had told Castorice earlier. “Before the war, I imagined myself standing in front of a canvas instead of behind sandbags. I thought I would travel somewhere quiet, sit in front of a river or a field, and spend hours trying to capture how the light changes. Now the only thing I have painted is walls with blood.”
Castorice’s fingers flexed around hers. “You still see the light,” she said. “You still notice it. That matters.”
“Not enough to change anything.”
“It changes me.”
Aglaea turned to her in surprise. Castorice held her gaze and did not look away.
“Every time you describe the sky,” Castorice continued, “you make it easier to bear the ground beneath it. That is not nothing.”
For a moment, Aglaea seemed at a loss for words. She looked back at the horizon as the last visible edge of the sun kissed the line of the earth and then began to slip behind it. The colors intensified briefly, deep oranges and reds flaring along the undersides of the clouds, then gradually softened into dusky blues and purples as the light drained away.
“It is beautiful,” Aglaea said.
“It is terrible,” Castorice replied.
“Maybe it is both.”
“Maybe that is the only way beauty survives here.”
The sun finally disappeared completely, leaving behind a sky that still glowed faintly along the edges, as if it were reluctant to accept the night. In the darkness, the flashes of distant gunfire and the occasional burst of tracer rounds became more visible, brief, violent streaks of light against a canvas that would have been peaceful if not for them.
The temperature began to drop, and a cool breeze slid along the trench, carrying more dust and the distant smell of burning wood. Somewhere, a mortar thumped, and after a brief pause, an explosion answered it.
A runner came down the trench then, boots pounding against the packed earth, breath coming in quick bursts. He slowed as he reached their position, raising a hand in a quick salute.
“Orders,” he said, lifting his voice just enough to be heard over the ambient noise. “You two are to remain here until further notice. Night patrol is being reorganized. There was a breach on the eastern line. Command wants you ready but staying put for now.”
Castorice nodded. “Understood.”
Aglaea lifted her rifle a little, as if to show she was prepared. “We will be ready,” she said.
The runner gave a brief nod and continued down the trench, shouting the same instructions to the next group.
They listened to his footsteps fade, then the trench settled back into its uneasy rhythm.
Aglaea shifted closer by an inch, enough that their shoulders pressed more firmly together. “It seems we are stuck with this sunset and each other for a little longer,” she said.
Castorice allowed herself a real smile, small but genuine. “I don't mind being stuck with you,” she replied.
Aglaea glanced at her, studying her profile in the dimming light. The soft glow from a distant flare brushed across Castorice’s face for a moment, highlighting the curve of her cheek, the line of her nose, the shadow where her helmet strap crossed her jaw. There was a smear of soot near her ear and a faint streak of dried blood along her neck where someone else’s wound had sprayed too close earlier that day.
“You look terrible,” Aglaea said quietly, an affection hidden behind the words.
Castorice snorted softly. “You have terrible taste,” she answered.
Aglaea’s lips curved again. “Apparently,” she said, and the weight of that single word hung between them like another kind of confession.
The night thickened around them, and stars began to prick through the veil of smoke in the narrow strips of sky that were still clear. The trench lamps remained unlit; any unnecessary light could draw fire. Their eyes adjusted slowly, learning to read the shapes of the world in shadow and silhouette.
They talked in low voices about small things for a while, circling around the larger truth they had almost spoken. They debated which cook in the mess hall burned the rations less frequently. They complained about the way the new boots rubbed blisters into their heels. They remembered a ridiculous training exercise where a commanding officer had fallen into a ditch in front of everyone and pretended it was intentional. Each story was a thread that tied them more tightly to something that was not the war, even though the war had woven itself into all of their memories.
At some point, the conversation quieted. They sat in silence, their hands still intertwined, their shoulders still touching, the sound of their breathing almost synchronized. The war continued beyond the sandbags, but here, in this small pocket of trench, there was a fragile, stolen kind of intimacy.
Castorice realized that she was no longer only afraid of dying. She was afraid of surviving without this, without Aglaea’s presence anchoring her to something that felt almost like a future. The promise they had spoken earlier had not erased that fear, but it had given it shape, given it something to lean against.
“Castorice,” Aglaea said softly.
“Yes.”
“If we don't make it,” Aglaea began, then paused, struggling to shape the words, “if something happens and I can't keep my promise, I want you to know that I meant it. Every part of it. I'm not saying this because we afraid or because this is a battlefield. I would say it anywhere. I would say it on a quiet street in a safe city, or in a house that doesn't shake when artillery falls. I would still choose you there.”
Castorice’s chest tightened so sharply that for a moment she could not inhale. The words were not quite the ones she had imagined, not the neat declaration she might have written in a letter if the world allowed such things, but they were more honest because of it. They were heavy and raw and shaped by the knowledge that life could end before a sentence did.
She turned to Aglaea fully, their knees bumping, their faces only inches apart. In the dim light, Aglaea’s eyes shone with unshed tears that did not fall, because tears were a luxury they could rarely afford.
“I would still choose you,” Castorice said, matching the honesty of the moment. “In a city without sandbags. Under a sky that is not on fire. In a life where we don't wear uniforms. I would still find you in a crowd and recognize you, and I would still walk toward you.”
Aglaea’s breath caught audibly. “We are fools,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Castorice agreed. “But we are fools together.”
For a heartbeat, the world narrowed down to the space between them. Castorice could feel the warmth of Aglaea’s breath against her lips, could see every fleck of color in her irises even in the dim light. There was a pull there, as undeniable as gravity. It would have been so easy to close the distance.
A flare burst overhead, flooding the trench with harsh, artificial light and snapping them both back into the larger world. Shouts rose further down the line as someone spotted movement in the dark beyond the wire. A machine gun opened up with a rattling roar, and the air filled with the hiss of bullets cutting through it.
Instinct took over. They tore their hands apart and swung their rifles up in almost the same motion, backs straightening, eyes snapping toward the edge of the sandbags. The soft, private moment folded itself away, buried beneath training and necessity, but its imprint remained on their skin.
“Positions,” someone yelled. “Eyes front. Watch the line.”
Castorice and Aglaea pressed their shoulders against the sandbags and peered over the edge, scanning the shadowed land beyond. The sunset was gone completely now, swallowed by night. The only light came from flares and tracer rounds and the occasional burst of fire where something had been hit and was now burning.
Their fingers rested on their triggers, their bodies ready to move, to run, to kill, to survive. The world had shifted back into its brutal, familiar shape.
Without looking away from the battlefield, Castorice extended her left hand slightly, letting it hang between them. Aglaea, her eyes still on the darkness beyond, reached out with her right hand and brushed the back of Castorice’s hand with her fingers before withdrawing again. It was the smallest of touches, quick and easily missed by anyone who was not paying attention, but it felt like another promise layered on top of the ones they had already made.
“After this,” Aglaea said under her breath, her voice steady despite the chaos building around them, “we will find each other.”
“After this,” Castorice answered, “we will not be lost.”
The night swallowed their words, but they remained, quiet and stubborn, like embers refusing to die.