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They sit in the bay of the UNSC outpost, at opposite edges of the same flat bench, staring blankly at the cables and wires that hang overhead like the canopy of a cold and glittering jungle. There’s a suitcase at Felix’s feet, small and dusty from nine months in storage. Personal items. Locus had none.
After the dirt and the quiet and the isolation of three weeks living like animals on some backwater graveyard of a colony planet, the bustle of the orderly outpost strikes Felix like a bizarre fever dream. With small motions, so no one will notice and catch on to the moment of uncertainty, Felix presses his fingers against his skin to check his vitals.
He feels healthy enough, for someone who had very nearly starved in the wilderness a week prior. The outpost is strange and hard to get his balance on. He finds it doubtful that civilization had always been this clockwork perfect, the little figures in their dress uniforms circling the walkways with precise purposeful steps.
For weeks it was just the two of them, dragging themselves from shadow to shadow, listening to each other’s ragged breathing over the radio they never turned off. A private channel just for them. They hadn’t had much to say by the end of it, not even Felix, who was famous for always having something to say about everything. But they hadn’t turned the radios off; even in the silence of the transport when they were finally recovered, Felix could still almost hear the breathing, static and magnified, as he leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. Now here they are, sitting on opposite sides of the same bench, stationary islands in a sea of military bustle. Felix itches in a way that can’t be scratched. Everything is too loud and too quiet at the same time: too loud because all these humans make so much ambient noise, too quiet because over the din he can’t hear Locus’s heavy, magnified breathing. They’re in uniforms, not armor, and their radios are probably sitting on the quartermaster’s shelf by now.
“Are they gonna leave us out here all night?” Felix snaps, because if one of them doesn’t say something soon he thinks he might just jam his own nails into his ulnar artery to relieve the itching silence. “You’d think we might deserve slightly better class of service? Considering what we’ve been through? On their account, I wanna add, I don’t know about you but I didn’t spend weeks eating snow and rodents because I thought it would be a neat cultural experience.”
Locus is quiet for a moment, and then like an old machine grinding to life at last, he says, “There is nothing special about our sacrifices. In war–”
“Fuck war,” Felix says, “I don’t wanna hear some philosophical garbage about sacrifice, I want to get off this bench and out of this goddamn hallway!”
Locus says nothing. Probably because he disapproves of complaining, or saying anything even remotely negative near people in dress uniforms. That hasn’t changed. Felix grits his teeth and wishes that Locus would say something, anything really.
This is the first time they’ve seen each other since transport dropped them off for medical treatment. Different treatment wards. Felix mostly just had exhaustion and dehydration to treat. Locus had… more than that. Felix wants to pick up an inane conversation, an argument, wants to fill the void between them that this empty bench represents.
“Medical here is garbage, right?” he says.
“I found it adequate,” Locus replies, stiffly.
“You would. Maybe they gave your ward decent pillows.”
Locus twitches like he wants to turn at look at Felix. He’s been burning a hole through the opposite wall for ten minutes, and it only now occurs to Felix that he’s doing it to keep from looking at other things, possibly Felix himself. “Pillows?”
“Did I stutter? Yes, pillows. They’re too flat–” Felix hurries to link more words on to the conversation before Locus can back out of it. “I keep startling awake in the middle of the night because—”
His jaw clicks shut. Locus is actually looking at him now, a kind of panic creasing the corners of his eyes and lips, the look of a man who has seen the shot fired and knows he can’t dodge. Down on the planet’s surface, with the rest of their unit all half-frozen into the icy marsh that constituted a field burial, Felix had taken to sleeping with his head in Locus’s lap. It made sense. Locus was less mobile, and could easily shake him awake at the first sign of trouble. Even the faintest creak of armor as Locus tensed was like a blaring alarm. It had made sense. They needed to stay close, to compensate for each other’s injuries.
Felix doesn’t at all like that he’s made it sound like he misses that intimacy.
For a moment it’s like they’re there again, propped up in the snow against the sagging wall of a bomb-hollowed farm house, everything except the radios disabled to reserve power. It’s hard to sleep in a helmet but you can do it if you’re tired enough and cold enough. Locus’s good arm had slotted into the space between Felix’s shoulder and jaw. He feels uneasy without that weight now. Itchy, exposed.
“Anyways,” Felix says, abruptly turning away, “it’s shit here. They wouldn’t even let me eat the first day, can you believe that?”
They’ve both returned to staring straight ahead, shoulders pressed flat against the wall. It’s concrete, and it’s cold despite the hallway’s warmth, stifled with human exertion.
“Unsurprising,” Locus says, and his mouth makes little dry clicking noises as he opens it. “You would have just thrown it up again.”
“I know that. I still deserve to shove some food in my mouth, regardless of whether I’m gonna hack it up later.”
“Wasteful,” Locus observes.
Felix snorts. “Look around, buddy, we’re back in the cradle of civilization. They can afford to waste a hamburger on me.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to be court martialed,” Locus says, all at once. It bursts out of his mouth like a winch broke, like a spring snapped open.
Felix’s hands tighten on his slacks. So much for small talk. He does want to hear this, he doesn’t want to hear it at all. Locus is never afraid, at least, he’s never admitted to it in front of Felix before. It’s a hell of a time start having that emotion all out of nowhere. Felix doesn’t want to be told this. He doesn’t want to be trusted with this.
“What the fuck could they even court martial us over? Disobedience? By the time it was over we didn’t even have a commander to disobey.”
“We abandoned our post,” Locus says. “We didn’t stay with the unit.”
They’re looking at the far wall, but they’re both thinking of the marsh, red frost on the bodies, placid and stinking and perfectly silent. The wind cutting through the air. The thing is, Felix isn’t obsessed the way Locus is, but he’s always thought of himself as a pretty good soldier. He had pride in his unit, pride in his species, confidence that their CO could get them to where they needed to go. In the marsh, he’d felt all that certainty cracking up like so much ice on the ground.
“We would have died,” Felix hisses.
“Soldiers are supposed to die,” Locus says. He swallows, and his throat moves with it. “Soldiers go where they need to go, and they die, and they are replaced.”
Okay, so Felix knows that the CO went pretty hard at Locus with the drill sergeant routine and Locus just took it, he knows that, but he’d never stopped to think that maybe it was changing Locus little by little, each time. It had just bounced right off Felix. But then, Felix had never obsessed the way Locus had. For a moment he wishes that he had done something about the CO and Locus, stepped in somehow, distracted them from each other. He was good at doing that kind of thing.
At the time it had been kind of meanly vindicating—disapproving Locus with his shiny boots and his perfect tin solider routine, Locus who never missed an opportunity to reprimand Felix in front of the other guys, Locus getting chewed out by the man he was keenest to impress. And Felix had sat in his bunk carving slivers of wood from the window sill while Locus stood there blank faced and absorbed that whole bullshit lecture for the thousandth time. Locus hadn’t been his problem. Locus hadn’t been anything to him, except a pebble in his boot that just wouldn’t come out. Even if he had known what it was doing to Locus, back then, he wouldn’t have gotten involved.
He hates to think it, but he knows himself too well to pretend otherwise: things are different now.
“Maybe that’s what they want you to think,” Felix tells him, venomous and quiet. “But it’s not true. When it comes down to it, everybody’s got a responsibility to keep themselves alive.”
Locus doesn’t look convinced. He’s got his chin jutted out like he’s standing on the executioner’s block, waiting for his turn. Felix’s blood boils. He didn’t invest all that blood and sweat in keeping Locus alive just to watch him toddle off to the chopping block like a wind up doll. They didn’t come all this way just to be thrown out now. He grabs Locus by the shoulder and drags him around, into the empty space between them.
Dying was one thing—scary, undesirable, sure—but surviving had turned out to be another entirely.
“I didn’t spend all those days in the fucking tundra keeping your sorry ass alive so you could come back here and complain about it. You wanted to live, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Locus says, like he’s physically dragging the word free. The sound practically creaks under the strain.
“Listen to me, every human being wants to survive. Every time you go out there you’re fighting for it. I don’t feel guilty that they died and I lived,” he says, practically spitting it, “because I fucking earned it. I lived because I worked for it and so did you.”
Locus looks down to the hand on his shoulder, and then back up to Felix. He’s hard to read at the best of times, but now he’s using a body language Felix has never seen before. “I don’t consider their deaths my fault,” he says, slowly, “that’s not where my guilt lies.”
“Well. Good,” Felix says. It kind of irritates him that Locus doesn’t have any reservations about survivor’s guilt, but it’s also kind of soothing in a way. They agree. They are in agreement. He lets go.
“We had—orders,” Locus says. “To stay. To fight. We disobeyed.”
“If we had stayed, we would have died. End of story. Were we ordered to commit suicide?”
Locus’s lips press tight, and this uncertainty Felix knows. He’s familiar with this language, he’s seen it in the barracks and in the transport, and in the marsh. Locus is trying to ground himself against something. He’s lost and he’s cut off from the only structure that he ever put any faith in, and he’s trying to figure out where he stands. He’s a walking, talking existential crisis.
Felix smooths a hand over the wrinkled collar of his partner’s shirt, a kind of soothing motion. His fingers linger there, against the hard warmth of bone and muscle. Locus says nothing about it, doesn’t even flinch away from the touch, and that’s when Felix knows he can fix this. Locus needs him to fix this. What’s more, he needs them on the same team, a united front against whatever is coming for them. He needs to know Locus has his back.
All he has to do is reframe this situation so that Locus can maintain his deluded self-narrative, so that he can continue to be what he thinks he is despite what he’s done.
“Our orders were to fight,” Felix says. “We did that. We fought. If they assumed that we were going to let ourselves be killed for no reason, then that’s their mistake. You say soldiers are expected to die, but I say soldiers are expected to stay alive. If we threw down our lives every time the situation went belly up, they’d run out of us. Only dumb animals stand still in the face of immediate death.”
Locus makes an uncertain noise. Felix shushes him, a hand now cupped reassuringly around his neck.
“It would be different if we’d had a chance,” Felix sort-of lies, “if there was a chance to win or even to score some kind of pyrrhic victory. But we were getting slaughtered out there, we were pinned down and helpless and if we had stayed then we’d be a couple more bodies not-decomposing in that fucking swamp.”
Slowly, Locus nods.
Felix pats his cheek, jaunty and insincere, and says “Good man.”
Locus just looks at him, and for once it seems like he doesn’t register Felix’s flippant irony. It’s almost like Felix’s hand against his cheek is the only lifeline in a stormy ocean, the realest thing in his world. It nearly takes Felix’s breath away. He’s never seen Locus this uncertain, this vulnerable, not even with a bullet in his arm crawling through the slush of a miserable graveyard planet. Felix feels a thrill of power light up his belly, intoxicating and hot. For a moment, he’s the center of Locus’s world. The star that Locus orbits.
“Just let me do the talking,” he says, sweetly, fingers lingering against dark skin. “They’ll see it our way.”
And they do.
Felix spins them the story that they want to hear, the noble CO and the loyal men, manages to scrounge up some halfway relevant intell from his hazy battlefield memories, looks appropriately heartbroken where necessary—no one is left alive to contradict his story, all he has to do is sell it. So he does. He doesn’t even lie, really, he just reframes it so that the right parts are showing. They walk out of the whole ordeal with a commendation and a little trinket of a medal, and reassignments to different units.
They compare orders in the hall between their shoebox rooms, or they try to anyways. People keep coming up to ask them about What Happened Down There. Between shooing away endless fresh-faced privates, they come to the realization that they’re shipping out to different fronts. It’s weird. It’s weird because a couple months ago Felix would have done just about anything to get Locus sent off to the other side of the galaxy, and now he’s vaguely annoyed, turning over both of their papers in search of something he might have missed, some place they might be coming back together again. It’s not surprising that the higher ups weren’t interested in keeping them together—as far as Chuck at the secretary’s desk is probably concerned, they’re individual assets. Storyless pawns. There’s no reason to keep them together.
“Guess I’m finally rid of you,” he says, handing Locus’s assignment back to him. “They couldn’t’ve done it a year ago, the bastards.”
Locus doesn’t say anything. The way he takes the paper back seems to indicate that he’s reluctant for some reason, possibly for the same reason that Felix is feeling itchy and trapped again, in a way he can’t seem to scratch.
“You know,” he says, painstakingly flippant, “they say trauma’s a stronger bonding agent than romance.”
He's watching Locus’s face for signs of… something. Anything. He’s an acupuncturist testing for reflexes. The results he gets are almost unintelligible, a flicker of surprise and then abrupt nothingness, like a wall came crashing down between them. Felix had thought he’d gotten pretty good at reading Locus while they were mucking through the death and the dirt down there, but now he’s starting to think that Locus was just letting himself be read. Maybe he thought they were never coming back. Maybe he hadn’t cared enough to keep himself in reserve anymore. Whatever it was, the infuriating coldness is firmly back in place now.
Felix’s lip curls down, frustration and this ugly undercurrent of betrayal rising up in him like acid.
“Dumb, huh,” he says, folding up his assignment with jerky movements. “I’m not gonna miss you either.”
Locus’s huge hands cover Felix’s, stopping him mid-fold. Felix glares up at him.
“Be safe,” he says, in a slow rasp that sounds like its causing him pain to dredge up from his closing throat. “Stay alive.”
Brown over tan. Felix can feel his callouses, the rough but giving segments of his flesh, each of their hands a weapon in its own right. Those hands would be gathering ice in a frozen ditch somewhere at the edge of the civilized galaxy if it weren’t for Felix. No matter where Locus goes, that’s still true. A proprietary fierceness creeps through him, like a choking vine. No matter what Locus wants, that’s still true.
“Yeah,” he says, “you too, I guess. Make out in one piece and I’ll even buy you a drink, because I’m such a nice guy.”
“I don’t drink,” Locus says.
The choking vine squeezes Felix, his chest, his throat – why is this hurting him? – but his eyes still roll the way they're supposed to, and his voice still comes out just the right amount of scathing and disinterested when he says, pulling away, “Of course you don’t.”