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One day, Lomedy woke up weeping.
Lomedy himself was particularly surprised by this; he’s not a weeper. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t panic. He’s always been exceptionally good at managing his emotions. He had to be, for a very, very long time.
He wakes weeping anyway. And as he does he presses his face into his hands and gasps slipping breaths and falls apart silently and Flamefrags—sweet, anxious Flamefrags—breaks a regen potion over Lomedy’s head.
Then there’s shattered sparkling pink and glimmering glass all over their bed and Lomedy’s hair and he just gapes.
“Flame?” Lomedy gasps.
“Is that better?” his best friend breathes, hovering. His hands are trembling. “Lomedy? Are you with me?”
He stares at the person who looks like Flamefrags for one long, brutal second. “The weather,” he gasps. “What’s the weather like?”
Flame looks at him blankly. Pastel pink regen drips off of Lomedy’s eyelashes. He presses himself far against the carved headboard of their bed as a sickening, secretive doubt creeps in right under his tongue. Lomedy feels around blindly under the pillow for the little paring knife he keeps under there for emergencies. Is his nametag the same? Is that a capital I instead of an l? There’s no way to tell. He’d never be able to tell. His friend (?) looks from him to the window, still pitch black with earliness, and then back at him, before something clicks in his head.
“It’s sunny out,” says Flame, with a strained little smile. So eager to fix it all. “Is that okay? Are you…?”
Good.
Lomedy takes a moment to gently pick a bit of glass out of his hair. “Yeah,” he sighs, because this really is Flame. “I’m good. Go back to sleep.”
His best friend just shakes his head. His eyes are terrified and wide and brown. He’s wearing his red satin bonnet, and his blindfold is off, and he looks frazzled.
“You were having a panic attack, Lomedy,” Flame tells him. He sounds annoyed and gentle. Both, somehow.
Lomedy doesn’t have panic attacks. Or, well, he does—just never where anybody can see him. It’s a survival tactic, he thinks. Learned… somewhere. In the Mafia, maybe, or in the server he came from before. Panic is earned and must be expressed, just someplace where nobody can see it.
“I wasn’t–” Lomedy starts, before he catches a glimpse of how Flame is looking at him. “I mean. I—the regen was a little much.”
Flame tilts his head, considering. He looks a little sheepish. “Sorry,” he says. “I panicked.”
It’s quiet, for a moment.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Flame asks.
“No,” Lomedy says.
“Okay,” says Flamefrags, and then his best friend helps him carefully step out of bed, and he sits him down in front of their bathroom mirror and spends half an hour picking the glass out of his hair with a fighter’s careful precision. As he does, he yaps and yaps and yaps about fighting techniques, and the tournament he’s going to this weekend, and how much he hates his competitors, and how he’s going to smash them into a thin, gross paste. It’s funny, actually—how he elaborates in great detail on the ways he’s going to destroy his opponents while delicately untangling glass from Lomedy’s hair.
Then Flame kisses the top of his head and pats his cheek gently with his palm and Lomedy thinks about how strange it is that his mind is kissable with the kind of memories he keeps up there and Lomedy sits still at the breakfast table as Flame makes something breakfast-like and hums a song Lomedy taught him.
Sixteen tons and what-do-you-get? Flame’s singing voice is low, unpolished, earnest, Another year older and deeper-in-debt…
Outside, an owl makes mournful hooting calls. There’s a pot of mint on the windowsill. It looks like it’s shaping up to be a nice day when the sun rises in maybe three hours.
“French toast?” Flame asks. He tosses a thick slab of brioche in between his palms. Every time the surface of the bread touches his skin, it sizzles.
“Mmhm,” Lomedy murmurs. “What are you thinking of?”
Flame has different heating settings than most players. For example, his body temp raises precipitously when he’s mad, or very happy, or embarrassed, or frustrated. It’s intimidating as hell on a battlefield and very useful for Lomedy, ‘cause he hasn’t had to cut firewood in months—he just grabs Flame out from wherever and gets him to heat up—the most effective and reliable method, recently, being embarrassing Flame by communicating honestly with him about what a great teammate he is—stick something heat-conductive in his hands, and bam! Portable, huggable stove.
“When you taught me how to dance the Charleston,” says Flamefrags. Painfully, easily honest. He flips his slice into his palm. “Makes me happy.”
“Oh,” says Lomedy. He hides his smile with a sip of his black coffee. “That’s nice.”
As Lomedy eats, Flame cleans the bedroom. Strips the potion-soaked sheets, sweeps up the glass, throws the bedding in the laundry basket. He remakes the bed with the second, less desirable set of sheets (because they have dogs on them, and Lomedy prefers the bunny-themed ones), and Ashen, who snuck into the kitchen so Lomedy could feed him bits of bacon and sausage, nuzzles at Lomedy’s palm. His nose is cold and wet.
“Ashen,” Flame says, soon as he returns from cleaning. He smells like vinegar and the sweet bubblegum scent of regen. Ashen runs from where he’d been faithfully sneaking bits of sausage from the table to sit at Flame’s side like the well-trained wolf he is.
“Were you keeping Lomedy company?” he asks his little dog. He pats Ashen on the head. “That’s a good boy.”
“He’s a great little protector,” Lomedy says.
“I feel very safe,” he lies.
He lies but it’s not Flame’s fault; not Ashen or the owl’s fault either. It’s just how it is.
Still, it makes Flame smile with one corner of his mouth; a lopsided half-smile. At first, Lomedy had thought Flame was smirking at him whenever he smiled like that. But no—it’s just how Flamefrags smiles. A crooked little smile. It shows his pointy canine teeth.
“Are you gonna try to go back to sleep?” Flame asks. He settles down in the chair across from Lomedy and cracks a raw egg in his mouth as Lomedy watches in practiced horror. He can hear the sizzling from here.
“So gross,” Lomedy manages. “You know I think that’s so gross.”
Flame just shoots him a pointed look, and smiles his crooked smile and swallows. “Protein,” he says.
Lomedy just fake-gags, and Flame laughs at him, and cracks and eats another egg—he’s got to wonder—how much could it possibly cook in his mouth?—before Flame fixes him with a look.
“Are you, bro?” his friend asks, softly.
Lomedy tilts his head. “Am I what?”
“Going to try to get back to sleep.”
He doesn’t freeze; Lomedy got really good at not freezing a long time ago. He rolls with the rancid terror that slips along his spine and folds his hands behind his head and leans back in his chair. Not too far, because this is the chair with the flimsy back, and he’s watched Flame nearly eat shit on this thing one too many times to make the same mistake.
“I dunno,” he says, casually. “I might try.”
“So no,” says Flamefrags, and he sighs. Lomedy would usually be annoyed, but Flame is right, and that’s more impressive than it is upsetting.
“Do you want me to—”
“Stay in my sight,” Lomedy finishes, before Flame can even ask. “Just—stay where I can see you. That’s all I need.”
“Okay,” agrees his best friend, and then he cleans up the kitchen while Lomedy watches, and threads his fingers through Lomedy’s and drags him to their bedroom. Then Flame sits on a rocking chair and reads while Lomedy huddles into a tiny ball on the floor in the foot of space between their bed and the nightstand and puts his back to a wall.
Flame has his glasses on. He looks like a nerd when he does that. Lomedy tells him so.
“You look like a nerd when you do that,” he says.
Flamefrags just looks at him over the gold rim of his glasses, and Lomedy remembers that he’s got his knees pressed to chest and he’s rocking back and forth a little bit and the ridges of his spine are pressing into the wall, and that he probably looks like the world’s most traumatized farmer, and then he shuts his mouth.
“Sure, bro,” says Flame, politely.
The first time this happened, Lomedy couldn’t get Flame to go more than three feet away from him. But he didn’t need physical touch—not like Flame does when he gets in his head. He just needs space and a line of sight and his back to a wall.
Flame’s book is dark red and there’s some squiggles on the spine. He’s not certain what it says, but Lomedy would bet money that it’s some stupid rom-com about the true meaning of Christmas or the forbidden love between a griefer and a member of the city guard. Or an academic treatise on the philosophical nature of fighting.
Then Flame just reads. And the sun rises slowly somewhere that is not here, and the owl hoots lowly, and Ashen snuffles softly, curled up at Lomedy’s feet.
“I’m not gonna get replaced,” says Flame, after a long silent time, and in a second Lomedy’s gentle farmer’s hands close around the knife he keeps under the bed—different, mind you, than the one he keeps under the pillow—and draws it out in front of him. The blade is long as his forearm and sharpened religiously to a razor’s edge. Then he catches the pale light glinting off of it like sunlight on exposed bone and catches himself; returns the blade to its place under the bed. Still, he keeps his hand on the hilt. He looks up, but Flame is still reading his book. Ashen seems unbothered. Good. Nobody caught his flinch.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“I’m too strong, bro,” Flame just continues. “Like, if whatever—in your past server, I mean, if it—” he blows out a breath through his teeth. “I could kill it, I bet.”
“You couldn’t,” Lomedy replies thoughtlessly. “It wouldn’t even let me log out.”
“Oh,” says his best friend.
“Yeah.”
“That’s…” Flame trails off. He looks sick and scared.
“Sorry,” he says, and then shuts his mouth. Lomedy doesn’t know what he’s sorry for. He doesn’t know why he said anything at all.
“No, it’s—don’t be… um. Okay,” Flame finally settles on. “Maybe I couldn’t kill it. I could definitely hold my own, though. And I could, like, you know. Protect you. And I wouldn’t die.”
Lomedy doesn’t like this conversation.
“You would.”
Flame just kisses his teeth and snaps his book shut. “I won’t. You think I got this title for fun? I don’t die.”
He laughs to himself, a little. “Right,” he says. “Of course. Immortal Demon.”
“That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”
Flame lifts his book back up again. This time, he can vaguely make out the title: Live in Fragments No Longer: The Sociality of Dueling and the Individual Imagination in Human Nature.
“Read to me?” Lomedy asks, before he even really knows what he’s saying.
“You want—?” Flame starts, before glancing back down at his book. “It’s pretty dry.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Just to hear it. You know.”
Just to hear a human voice. His teammate looks at him for a long moment. Then he starts speaking.
“An anthropology of duelling,” Flame begins. He takes on a slower, smooth reading voice. “Has come to see in duelling more about the body, and understanding and relating with that body, than it has Kantian notions of an empirical or transcendental imagination. For Johnson, then, in a study of tournament culture, duelling is often about abandonment: physical, emotional, and social. Thus enters the ‘psychophysicality of human experience’ described by Marion,” Flame says. Now he sounds like a nerd, too. “A deep bonding through a sustained negotiation of space with others…”
Lomedy lets his head fall back against the warm wooden wall and the drone of dry academic treatises on cognition and movement and the other. Touch breaks the boundary between self and not-self, Flame says, somewhere, distantly. Blurs the distinction between you and me.
Maybe when the sun rises, as it will eventually, not right now but eventually, when it finishes rising on someone else and starts rising here, he can go out to the garden. Sit in the sun for a while. It would be nice to sit in the sun for a while.
“Lomedy?”
He jolts; tenses up for a second before feeling wood grain along his fingertips and the fluff of Ashen at his feet and the sweet smell of woodsmoke. Flame’s kneeling in front of him, his book forgotten on his rocking chair.
“Can’t sleep on the floor when the bed’s right there,” his friend jokes, but Lomedy shakes his head a little bit, wipes a little bit of sleep out of his eyes.
“This is good,” he says. “The floor’s good. Just for a little longer.”
Something softens around Flame’s eyes. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, bro, okay. Um, but I’m gonna lie down, I think.”
“Okay,” says Lomedy, even as he digs his nails into the floorboards.
It’s hotter, actually, with Flame even just within a few feet. His friend flops down on top of their bed and lets out a long sigh; lets his hand hang over the side of the bed so Lomedy can tangle their fingers together.
His teammate gives Lomedy’s hand a squeeze.
“If I’m holdin’ on, I can’t be replaced, right?” Flame says. “So just hold on. And I’ll… you know.”
“I know,” says Lomedy, softly. “I do.”
“Good,” his best friend sighs, and yawns, and settles into their secondary light orange dog-themed sheets.
An owl hoots outside in the garden; night rain taps on their window like a lost child. He lays his forehead against his best friend’s hand-in-his.
It’s easy to imagine, now, dark rain on the delphiniums; water collecting in the cups of bluebells and rolling low along the soil until the creek joins the ribboning river and slides easily away into the salt sea. It’s easy to imagine warped jaws and small bright eyes watching hungrily in the dark; friends who move with broken twisted joints and speak with false voices. It’s easy to imagine the warm dry calloused hand in his bent in the wrong directions and still clamped around his wrist like a vice—empty houses with black-eyed windows and light-filled endless voids and dreamlike mirror-reflections of the self; of it slipping through the space between servers and lives and finding him again, like it always did, like it always does.
Then his best friend’s thumb traces over the knuckles in his hand in slow, sweeping motions, and he stops imagining altogether. Instead, he stretches out his cramped up knees and sidles up onto their beds—onto Flame’s side, really—presses his hand flat against Flame’s shoulder to push his teammate to the side. He grumbles but rolls over anyway, and then Lomedy curls up in the radiantly warm spot he leaves behind.
“Flame,” Lomedy whispers, quietly. “What’s the weather like?”
“Sunny as a summer day,” his best friend replies, just under his breath, his back turned to him. “Maybe we should have a picnic or something later.”
“Sure,” he smiles, small. “That sounds nice.”
Flame squeezes his hand. Lomedy holds on.