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When Rabi Ray Rana casually invited Ajay Ghale over for a drink during one of their post-propaganda mission radio conversations, he hadn’t expected the savior of Kyrat to actually take him up on it. So when Ajay does show up, toting a six-pack of beers and a shy smile, Rabi damn near trips over himself to make him feel at home – to make him feel welcome, at the least.
“Oh, are you working?” Ajay asks, already poised to retreat, and Rabi blathers something about what if honey badgers were made of actual honey wouldn’t that be weird now here’s some music to think on that to before launching up out of his chair.
“Not anymore,” he blurts. “Lunch break. I get one. I take one whenever I want. No one here to stop me. Well, except Chotu, but Chotu, he’s always on lunch break. Break, anyway, don’t know about lunch. Is that alcohol?”
Ajay laughs, apparently nonplussed by Rabi’s frenetic stream of words. “Yes, it’s alcohol. I mean, I don’t know if it’s good; I took it from the back of a Royal Army truck. But I figure you’re pretty isolated, so maybe you would take what you can get.” As soon as the words leave his mouth, he immediately looks stricken. “I mean – oh my God, that was so rude. That sounded so rude. I didn’t mean – ”
“Beer is beer, man,” Rabi interrupts him, taking the case from his hand and carting it over to his dented mini-fridge. “You want one or two?”
Ajay shrugs. “I figured we’d start with one, see if we could still stand each other, go from there.” That smile flashes again, almost too fast to catch, and it hits Rabi hard in the palm of his heart. “Is that – does that sound okay?”
“That sounds perfect,” Rabi says, not bothering to hide his exuberance. “Great. Amazing. Fantastic, even.”
Ajay laughs, which is what Rabi wanted. He’ll make a fool out of himself every second of every day if that’s what it takes to make Ajay happy – to make him look exactly like this, like a 20-something enjoying an afternoon off with a friend instead of like the only man standing between a war-torn country and its destruction.
“Alright,” he says, and even as the smile fades from his face it lingers in his eyes. “Cool.”
*
It becomes a routine. Every week, Ajay swings by Rabi’s place with drinks and occasionally snacks, and they just hang out. Sometimes they talk; sometimes they don’t. Rabi couldn’t conceive of working with the son of Mohan in the same room, at first, but after he becomes more accustomed to the other man’s presence, it becomes as easy as working with Chotu. Hell, half the time Ajay is less distracting than Chotu; or rather, they’re each distracting in their own way. Ajay doesn’t disrupt broadcasts by rustling around in a box, but he does have a habit of leaning in close whenever Rabi speaks to him directly that quickly derails whatever train of thought he was attempting to convey. It’s bad.
No, really – it’s bad.
So bad that when Rabi says “Hey, come look at this fish!” in his lake that’s usually devoid of life, he literally forgets what he was looking at when Ajay immediately comes to his side to lay a hand on his shoulder and peer into the water. It’s not just the fact that Rabi is hyper-conscious of physical contact, largely due to the fact that he’s never really met anyone who has actively wanted to touch him; it’s also to do with the way Ajay smells. He remembers reading on some website one time that the people you’re attracted to smell better than others, and if that’s the case then he’s got it bad for Ajay Ghale. Not that he didn’t already know that, but it’s one thing to sort of half-acknowledge it in the back of his mind, and another thing entirely to be standing in the afternoon sun, staring at the back of Ajay’s neck and trying not to inhale as deeply as he wants to. The savior of Kyrat smells a little like sweat, of course, because you gotta sweat when you’re trying to save a country or you’re probably not trying hard enough. But it doesn’t smell bad, and anyway it’s overridden by the powerful combination of scents that all come together to make one that’s uniquely Ajay. A little like smoke, a little like alcohol, a lot like something sweet – incense, maybe, though Rabi doesn’t spend enough time at shrines or temples these days to be sure.
It’s hard enough for the DJ to keep it together while pretending not to be actively sniffing the son of Mohan, and it becomes almost impossible when Ajay says “Oh! I see it” and drops to his knees by the lake. Rabi abruptly finds himself incapable of maintaining a coherent train of thought with the man of his dreams at eye-level with his crotch.
Fortunately – or unfortunately, Rabi really isn’t sure at this point – Ajay doesn’t stay there for long. He’s up again in a few seconds, shaking his head and taking a pull from his beer.
“It’s not big enough to be one of those demon fish, but it might be snappy if you ever decide to go for a swim. Want me to take care of it?”
“Uh – no, it’s fine,” Rabi stammers. “I prefer to avoid violence – you know, when I can. It’s fine. But if I ever need fish for dinner, I’ll know who to call, yar?”
Ajay grins. “You can call me anytime,” he says. Rabi’s heart stutters to a stop, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to blurt out something really stupid – something like you don’t have to call, you’re welcome anytime, or don’t take this the wrong way but you smell fantastic, or will you get on your knees next time too – but he doesn’t get the chance.
It’s certainly not his nonexistent self-control that stops him, or even any kind of divine intervention. He inhales, opens his mouth, and then whatever the hell dumb thing he was going to blurt out turns into a yell as Ajay gives him a powerful shove into the lake.
No pun intended, but being pushed into a body of water without warning or permission tends to put a damper on a developing relationship of any sort. Rabi flails for a moment before finding his footing in the shallows, straightens up, and prepares a targeted stream of profanity and demands for an explanation that abruptly vanishes from his tongue as he sees that Ajay wasn’t shoving him around so much as he was knocking him out of the way. Namely, out of the way of the leopard that the son of Mohan is currently on the ground with. He’s holding it off fairly well, but its teeth are locked onto his forearm, and its claws are swiping at his chest, tearing into and through his shirt. His windbreaker, ugly as it is, would have offered an extra layer of protection, but he left it draped over Rabi’s chair inside – a fact that the DJ is painfully aware of as he watches Ajay roll over and try to scramble away, only for the leopard to let out a yowl and leap onto his back.
Rabi Ray Rana is far from being a man of action, but he’s not going to just stand around and watch his only friend apart from Chotu get torn apart by a wild animal. He moves before he thinks, scooping up a rock and hurling it with frantic desperation in the general direction of the conflict. He’s got a decent arm, and aim to match, so he’s shocked and horrified when the projectile surpasses the leopard entirely and smacks Ajay solidly in the temple.
Rabi makes a desperate noise that’s swallowed by a matching yowl from the leopard, which loses interest in Ajay as he falls limp underneath it. Turning around, it locks eyes with the DJ, pinning its ears back against its head and bounding towards him with intent to kill.
Its swiping claw just barely grazes his cheek before the gunshot rings out, echoing off the two buildings that separate Rabi’s studio and home. It’s followed by three more, in rapid succession, and then –
“Are you alright?!” Ajay sounds almost hysterical, his hands fluttering across Rabi’s face and body as he looks for injuries. Rabi is kind of zoned out at first, heady with the rush of having survived a close encounter with being mauled to death; after a long moment, he realizes that Ajay is asking him a question. This is coupled with his realization of how close the other man is; his nostrils burn with the heat of adrenaline and the spicy tang of blood, and that’s when he snaps out of his daze and into a panic of his own.
“Am I alright? Who cares, man, it barely touched me! Are you alright? You’re not alright.” He answers his own question, taking in Ajay’s current state. Sure, the cat scratch across his face burns, but he can tell it’s pretty shallow – if he deals with it properly, it won’t even scar. Ajay, on the other hand, is in such a state that Rabi doesn’t even know where to begin. There’s blood everywhere, his arm dripping with it, his head, his shirt –
“Your shirt’s ruined,” Rabi says, stupidly, but it’s the only thing he can think to say. He’s not trained in first aid – hell, he can barely use a Band-Aid. This is so far outside his area of expertise that it’s not even funny.
“ ‘S okay,” Ajay says after a moment, during which Rabi belatedly realizes they’ve been making eye contact. Seemingly satisfied that the DJ is, in fact, perfectly fine, the son of Mohan steps back and strips off his shirt.
The commentary that Ajay Ghale’s naked torso would normally elicit dies in Rabi’s throat at the sight of the extent of the damage done by the leopard. “Dude, you are – you are so far from okay. Can I – will you – what – ”
“Calm down,” Ajay murmurs. Pulling a syringe out of his pocket, he jams the business end into his bicep, letting out a gasp of relief as whatever it contains floods his system. “It’s fine. I’ve had worse.”
“Worse?” Rabi blurts, and he knows it’s probably true because after all, Ajay’s practically freed the entire country single-handedly, of course he’s been hurt before. Even if he doesn't take that into account, the evidence is right in front of him, with old and new scars and fresh injuries peppering the other man’s torso, his arms and shoulders.
“Yeah. This one time, I took a bell tower, right? Knocked out Pagan’s transmission, cleared the airways, you know the deal.” While Ajay talks, he works, and Rabi watches with a kind of morbid fascination as he wipes his arm clean, wraps it in crisp bandages. “Ziplined out of it when I was done, right into a pack of wolves. That was fun.”
“Wow, man,” Rabi says. “You know, it doesn’t sound particularly fun. You’re really bleeding a lot, is there – is there anything I can do?”
Ajay shrugs and immediately regrets it, grimacing at the motion. “Nah, they’re pretty shallow. I’ve gotten used to fending off the wildlife around here,” he adds with a wry smile. “I’m just sorry about my shirt. Guess I’ll have to buy a new one.”
“You can borrow one of mine.” The words are out of his mouth before Rabi realizes what he’s saying. “Hell, you can have it. If anyone deserves to take the shirt off a man’s back, it’s you. Not that that’s what you’d be doing, I mean, I have plenty of shirts, but you know, I can lounge around shirtless all I want, no one would care. But you, you’ve got stuff to do, guys to beat up, animals to wrestle – ”
“Thanks,” Ajay interrupts him, and Rabi is so grateful that he does, because his rant was headed on the fast track towards a diatribe about the breadth of Ajay’s shoulders and the circumference of his arms, and those are comments he would rather not make face-to-face. “I’d appreciate that.”
*
Ajay gets busy with Golden Path stuff and can’t come to hang out in the next few weeks, but he does return the shirt. At least, Rabi assumes it was him; it’s left on his doorstep, neatly folded, with a note that says I washed it as well as I could! The DJ wishes he could say otherwise, but the first thing he does is ruin the folding job by bringing the shirt up to his face and breathing in. It smells fresh, like Kyrati water and soap; but it also smells like Ajay, and for some reason, the color of the shirt – bright yellow, one of Rabi's favorites – is what helps him identify the sweet scent.
“Marigolds, people,” he says insistently, slamming a fist on his desk for emphasis. “Ajay Ghale, the savior of our country, you want to know what he smells like? He smells like marigolds. You heard it here first, on Radio Free Kyrat, your number one source for news and gossip. And no, don’t ask me how I know that, I’m not at liberty to divulge my sources. But if you want to smell like Ajay, look no further than a nearby flower patch. I mean, you might have to sweat a little too, after all the guy works hard, but that’s pretty much the gist of it. If I get more information, I’ll let you know, but for the time being just be aware that the guy smells every bit as good as he looks.”
After the broadcast, he gives a passing thought to that not being the sort of thing to share live on the radio. But it doesn’t bother him too much, and if Ajay protests – well.
“Listen, man, I had to share,” he says, initiating an unsolicited radio call to Ajay’s channel to head him off at the pass. “The people, you know. Times are dark. I have to keep up morale.”
There’s a long pause, which is understandable – Ajay might be driving, or in a Golden Path meeting, or fighting two bears on fire at once. Who knows; Rabi isn’t sure what the guy gets up to, but he likes to imagine that it's something exciting. Finally, however, a response comes through, with voices murmuring in the background. A meeting, then. Definitively not exciting.
“I don’t even know what marigolds smell like,” Ajay tells him, his voice tight; then, rather than immediately get off the line, he demands sharply, “Did you just smell me?”
“Time is short, brother,” Rabi hears Sabal say faintly. “And Mr. Rana has an unfortunate habit of putting things on the air that shouldn’t be there.”
“Alright, fine. Bye, Rabi,” and then the connection is cut off, leaving the DJ smiling stupidly in the dim lighting of his studio.
“Marigolds,” he echoes to himself, and tries not to think about the fact that there’s a patch of them growing on the far side of his lake.