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“Dani?” Curan picks up the handheld radio, feet jumping up rungs of a ladder chewed by rust.A faint click. And then the familiar notes of the Repasibe frequency. “I can’t connect to any of their ships. I just keep hearing ringing—”The night flashes, and seconds later in the silent breath of Tsu-Nainh, a faint bang follows.“Holy shit. Was that a satellite?”But there’s no alert to paint the world red. There is no padded sound of footsteps nor the clinks of guns and dogtags waiting to strike.Curan points the radio at the black sky. “Dani, tell us where you are. We’ll come by to drop supplies,”“Don’t worry about me— You guys need to hear this,” His voice shakes. His voice has never shook before, not with horror, not with anger.Their radio is not kind to urgency. Each word fades out into static, but it’s still so silent the walls whisper between breaths, as if their planet was shot and left dry-heaving before a heavy retching washed through it. “Tsu-Nainh has been evacuated.”A louder bang, just barely visible through the panels of dilapidated wood.“The planet is empty,”Through the rotted planks, the eyes of his team, his family, and everyone they’ve come to protect, peer at him. Curan does not need to beg them to look away, Sungo’s hands are already cupped around the young girl’s ears.“The planet is empty,”
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Curan is six and familiar with planes from a distance.He’s only six, and this time of year, the blush rounds his features and his mother’s soft kisses are scattered among dusty freckles. By the time he is thirteen, his face will be gaunt, and he will have shot up to his mother’s height. No longer will her freckles make his eyes pop, and no longer will either of them smile at the sound of his voice.But for now, Curan is six. The jet engine before him coughs soot in his face.His father steps forward, depressing the cracked earth below him. The ground shakes imperceptibly beneath them once, then twice, as if the planet’s own maw is waiting to open underneath the tarp above land. “We build planes,” Curan’s father says, voice as gravel-worn as his boots. The old man’s hands have never been unstained by oil and dirt, not that Curan at this age knows his large hands very well nor needs to remember. But his own little fingers are still sandy from roughing it in the torn-down field behind the fort with some mechanic’s boy named Gaul, and he still has time to play.But he doesn’t. While his friend Gaul frustratedly chucks debris into the massive pit of sharp iron and metal just outside their fortifications, Curan watches his father negotiate with two men under the boiling hot Do-Jeomang sun. The trees, scarce as they are, tilt one way and curl inwards like the hair on the arm of a monkey.“Gaul,” The recruiter says, in a strange accent Curan’s also never heard of before, a deep purple under his flesh the hue of the night sky in those rare moments no planes fly overhead.Little does he know that in ten, twenty years, God willing Curan lives that long, this man’s skin will be bound, tanned, bone dried, and turned to Naian hide.“He builds planes,” Turtle Neck nods to an even older man, another one in funny green-tinted goggles that double the size of his enormous green eyes, just outside Curan’s periphery. He looks nothing like Curan’s friend Gaul. He is hunched over, dotted with burns, and wrinkly, and balding— even if they have the same brittle curls that hang low past their chins with the same droopy lashes. The mechanic is debatably ancient, maybe seventy or even more, and he’s tending to the wing of another plane blown through by Repasibe cannons.Curan’s never met someone above sixty before, but he knows about planes, too. He’s watched his mother and father dance around each other in the workshop. He sleeps right there with them, under the gentle creaking of sheet metal and rust, and so he has to stop himself from stepping forward.“We build planes,” His father, the pillar, tugs Curan’s older brother towards the fort by the wrist. We, us, our. It is as warm as he gets, tepid as the sun in the sky. “My son knows a fair bit more than I do.”xSlowly, over time, they become friends.“My dad builds planes!”“My dad does too, and his planes are bigger and better and way stronger, and one day he’s gonna make this wicked huge rocket!”“Easy for you to say. I bet your dad doesn’t even let you in the workshop!”“Fuck you!”“Fuck you! My dad—”“Piss off with your dad! Your dad is wrinkly, old, and scary!”“Yes, I do. H-he lives in the night zone!”The father, Gaul, as it turns out, has six daughters and one son. Neither brother liked the only son, Gaul, who took after his father in most respects.“My dad lives on the edge of the night zone. Building and building and building. He made this wicked huge rocket! Wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. Built his own planes and everything!”“Both of you, just shut the hell up,”“Ronan, tell him! Tell, tell, tell him, Ronan!”“Tell him what?”“That–”“That our fucking dad lives in the Night Zone? He doesn’t.”Curan’s brother Ronan did not talk to him. He was maybe seventeen and he was still lanky, with hands too big for his own arms. They both took after their mother in looks, tall and thin and bug-eyed.xCuran is eleven and passes by a boy on the half-street. There are less soldiers than usual.His mother is bringing out food for the celebrations, Bone and Gaul, and other such people. His father is in the workshop. Ronan is nowhere to be found. He is told that they are friends.The bruises on Curan’s knuckles are the same purple as his skin. And by now, Curan knows that there are men.He thought they were made of bruises.Bruises look different on purple skin.Curan goes back to Gaul and Gaul, and because it is better than going back to his dad, because they will have no hand in raising him nor do they have hands to raise.xThe first time Curan sees the angel, that piece of shit, he falls.Within the inch-wide frame of a flimsy closet door, two half-shut eyes meet each other off the battlefield.Shit. Shit shit shit.The man staring back at Curan has a mirrored black eye. You’d need a crowbar to pry the swelling open. They’re matching.As they have been, in most respects.In the dead of morning, Curan’s kin found itself ambushed and trapped under rubble.It’s human.There’s the fucking angel.The leather of his jacket.
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(tldr; curan meets zombie as a kid after a celebration and festival. zombie is busy with his hospital after burying his father, and he witnesses curan hitting himself. They talk, zombie wastes time patching curan up out of compassion, they get into a fight.)Curan is eleven and passes by a boy on the half-street.His mother is bringing out food for the celebrations, Bone and Gaul, and other such people. His father is in the workshop. Ronan is nowhere to be found. He is told that they are friends.The bruises on Curan’s knuckles are the same purple as his skin. And by now, Curan knows that there are men.He thought they were made of bruises.Bruises look different on purple skin.Tsun Go’s stomach is perpetually small and hungry. He tends to patients before he tends to the kitchen. It’s not his job. Saire’s job is to keep morale up. Tsun Go’s is to keep everyone alive.“Why are you hitting yourself?”Curan goes back to Gaul and Gaul, and because it is better than going back to his dad, because they will have no hand in raising him nor do they have hands to raise.(tldr; curan after hiding, talks to his father in the workshop)“Sir?”
“Yes, boy?”“Why do you build planes?”
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Sehn Bin’s first night in the bunker is slow and quiet. There’s no gunfire to drown out thoughts, no kicking and screaming, no friends with penchants for mischief and no mothers to slow his fall.
Gaul leaves him a mattress, dragged all the way from the dilapidated top floor to the draughty, draft-filled bottom. It’s odd, it truly is. The facsimile of family that he has chased for so long standing right in front of him. His brother and his sisters would laugh at his state.When the hell did those two come back?From a distance, Sungo stands guard. His stare is expressionless, a deep set glare spanning the horizon line. It’s blank, though his eyes are strikingly lucid, as if he were reading the messages engrained in distant grains of sand. It’s a gaze that feels flaying, impolite to subject other people to, and Sehn Bin cannot stand to meet it. He screws his eyes shut, refusing to acknowledge the two that had dragged him kicking and screaming into their temporary, stolen and seized hideout. The Buwa Kan, the makeshift little hospital was once a safehouse, some sort of shelter for every wounded eye that happened upon it, every set of limbs burnt or bruised. Now, it belongs to some Kunlander and his ragtag group of terrorists.What he saw before he hid was to the left of the medic, the captain snoring on the cold ground. Shallow chuffs that would be imperceptible if not for the whistling at the tail end of exhales. His brow is furrowed, still. Even at rest, their bodies are on high alert. Not quite asleep, never deep enough; too deep, and they may as well be dead. “Couldn’t stop himself from… if it took a…” Sungo mutters to himself. “I should just… fucking hell, why do I bother?”Sehn Bin senses, rather than sees, Curan crack an eye open. Hears faint whispers carried by the draft in their shack as eyes bore into the back of his shaved skull. “Where’s the rest of us?” “I don’t know, what did you say to them?” He hears Curan mutter and Sungo parrot, neither of them really listening to the other, as the floors far from his bed start to creak with the slightest shift of weight. The shuffling of bags, the squeaking of boots against wood floors, the very familiar unclasping of the medkit. It’s all he can do when he’s hunkered down on top of a half-stuffed, brown-crusted mattress. Of course, besides slowly bleed, letting his mind slip from him through every pore.His head is pounding. The medicine should’ve kicked in by now.“So, I’ve been thinkin’, yeah. I’ll sew a big patch on the back of my jacket,” Curan starts, incessantly fingering a hole in the knee of Sungo’s pant leg. The blast radius singed about half of the fabric on the other leg, and the ensuing debris punched holes in more than just the armour of a few comrades. They were all lucky to have made it out of the area just in time. “You can think?” Sungo deadpans. “You promise?”“Oi,” The captain barrels on. “KILL ALL KUNLANDERS, it’d say.” He leans in with a flat affect. Sungo leans back as Curan inches forward, purposely obstructing the shorter man’s view of his medkit. Further, further, until the point of the needle presses against his neck.“It’s a little aggressive,” Then the needle is taken away. It is now carefully tucked inwards, tapping against Sungo’s wrist. “Don’t let the Kunlander in you win,”“Pooh,” Curan shoves Sungo just hard enough for the chair to teeter. Rebalancing would mean overshooting and somebody getting stabbed, so Sungo lets it happen.“Binnie’s looking like shit,”“Sehn Bin,”“Sehn Bin’s looking like shit,” And his accent never quite hits the vowels right, but he pulled a gun on the last person to call Binnie anything but an appropriate name, so it must count for something.Zombie cocks an unamused brow. “Because he’s allergic to the ena,” Their voices sound closer than they should be.“The fuck do you mean he’s allergic?” Before he knows it, the self-identified captain stands over him, nudging Sehn Bin’s shattered knee under his steel-toed boot. Sungo scoffs again, a heavy-handed thud echoing somewhere above Binnie’s head as he reprimands his superior officer with a strike. “I mean that he’s got no ena in his system, so he’s never built up an immunity. It’s not fucking aero science. You started off allergic, too, you fucking Kunlander,”“Don’t touch my patients. He’s dead,”“Pooh!”“I found a cat,”“Well, you can’t keep it,”“Why not?”“It’s cute!”—-“I’m so tired,” Sungo mutters to himself weakly.“Don’t touch that kid!” Curan shouts, finger trembling on the trigger.The last thing he sees is the children’s visage thrashing about in the smoke.—-“What’s that, a fiction book?”“No, my diary,”“Oh,” He snorts, pleased. “You write?”“I don’t have time to read, do I? And it’s not like there are any books,”“Make yourself conscious. I’m gonna need you to talk. Don’t stop talking until I’m done. Okay?” Sungo says gently, his touch almost ginger as he rewraps the bandages on Binnie’s feet.“I just don’t get what his deal is,” Binnie adds, in a rare moment of clarity. “What’s his deal? Why’s he like that?” Sungo can’t help but huff in agreement. “Mhm.”“I mean, I’ve held a gun before. Just not that gun, and I didn’t have to shoot that fast. Or run with it.”“Yeah,”“It’s not like he doesn’t know that I know,”“Mhm,”There’s too many kids around.“Tell me about your siblings,” Sungo hums.“My little sister… she’s, fuck, she’s…”Binnie is the third child of four.“Illang,” Sungo brushes his hair back. There was an old myth, that the third born son was made of gold. The golden one, where ‘ill’ came from. “Checks out,”“You should’ve been knocked out by now,” Sungo mutters.Saire sighs. “...The ena isn’t kicking in,”“Hey, don’t scream,”Binnie does.“I know, I know, I know,” Sungo whispers, pulls Binnie’s head into his chest. “But quiet down. Can you do that?”“Please, please, please find her. Please, please, please,” Binnie says, clutching Sungo’s shirt so hard it tears.Sungo struggles, not because he needs to get out, but because Curan pushes him down.—“I think we need to keep him close. Stuck in the base for a little bit.” Curan mutters to himself.Sungo glares. “Because that’s such a good idea, leaving him all alone,”
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Tsun Go Rang holds a child in his arms. The Repasibe soldier that took her had long been mauled wildly.His face is paler than bleached cowhide, skin shrivelled as if swarmed by voracious mosquitoes.“Why did you do that, you stupid fuck?” screams Curan.Oh, captain.He runs his shaky, red hands through matted hair. The blood sharpens each strand to a point. “You ruined it!”My captain.“Everyone back the fuck up!” Saire has her hands in her pockets,—-On the 19th day of the 4th month, Sungo Rang digs two graves.He has been digging for the better part of about five hours straight, carving away at rock solid, nigh immovable snow with his bare nails. His bowed head barely conceals the way his tears drip faucet-steady. Each drop freezes before they hit the ground.Behind him, the soft crunch of heavy boots draws nearer.“How much longer ‘til your fingers fall off?” Curan peers over him. It’s true. They’re starting to purple. The moisture on his face has already iced over, leaving biting kisses down his cheeks.Sungo huffs, clenches his numb fingers into fists, “Maybe an hour or two, in this weather. But if all else fails, at least I’ll still have my teeth,” and decides to clutch another handful of snow. He patiently carried two bodies on his person about a mile away from the crew, all the way into the Ice Zone for a reason. And yet, the reason trails him like lit gunpowder spilling out of his pocket. Like a rottweiler trails the boot that kicks.The nuisance is not deterred by the refusal to engage. He is generally undeterrable, much to the chagrin of everyone on the other side of him. “We need another pair of hands on deck. Saire can’t bring all the supplies by herself,” He lightly kicks the back of Sungo’s jacket, knocking him forward into the second grave. He falls with a tiny grunt, but it’s only two feet deep at most, and despite the ache in his joints and his peeling fingernails, the raw red ash sticking to the inside of his lungs, it doesn’t hurt to land.“Yes she can. I saw her dragging a full Noanuang carcass out of the woods before I left,” The tattoos on Sungo’s face distort with his scowl, voice flat with disbelief as he brushes the flakes of shit and insects off.Still, Curan looks down at him. “And Binnie’s not looking too well.” With Bin’s capacity to get sick, that may very well be a possibility. But Sungo had taken steps to ensure he wasn’t needed today. He planned it all night. Where he left the girls yesterday night, and how much food to leave on his plate in the morning.So no, he’s not convinced. He’s never convinced when it comes to Curan.“Sehn Bin was in my tent this morning,”“He relapsed,”A pause. “On what?”“Painkillers,” The blond man’s face is stony.“No, he didn’t. He’s allergic,”The captain offers his foot instead of his hand to help Sungo up. Sungo’s fingers twitch with the urge to drag him kicking and screaming into the other grave. He’s begging for it.Spitefully, they both stare at one another. The trees whistle a familiar tune.And then the glance occurs. The glance of acquiescence, but not defeat. “You can come back tomorrow,” Curan concedes. He still thinks he’s in control.The medic rises to his feet, “We need to be gone by sundown. You know I wouldn’t have to come back tomorrow if you just let me finish this now,” just to be greeted with an honest to god pout on Curan’s face. His cropped blond hair is matted every which way, frozen in place and forming little ice-berg spikes.Sungo has never done well with the cold, but Curan thrives in it. And yet, the captain shivers.“I’m almost done,” Sungo repeats, but slower. Like he’s talking to a child. He shouldn’t have to do this every time, and yet he does. Coddles his team members, holds them all by the reins. Why don’t they know when to roll over? “You can wait an hour or two. I’ll be right behind you when I head back, anyways.”“Sure, fine,” says the other man. Beep. Beep. Beep.Sungo’s eyes shift downwards on instinct, expecting a pocket detonator in Curan’s hand. And he’s right. Because Curan is an animal.Beep beep beep.In the split second his head snaps back to look at the second grave, the captain presses.Beepbeepbeep!Sungo hops out of the second grave with ease afforded to him by months of reflex dealing with a man like him.BAM!A sizable fireblast burns away the remaining shape of two rectangular boxes and leaves instead an unimpressive hole in the ground. Somehow, the pit of residue is both charred and wet. Still, if it detonated as close as it could’ve, both of them would’ve been deafened for at least a week.The last time Curan pulled a stunt like that, Sungo had yelled at him long enough that the others had held their hands over their ears and prayed it had been them instead. Binnie spent an inordinate amount of time translating the abuse they hurled at one another, amongst other things.But since they’re not deaf now, the pit continues to hiss. The bodies propped up against the tree harmonise with quiet groans. There’s too much gas in the air, and the atmosphere of this planet is already so hostile to their Outer Rim lungs.And his captain has just wasted valuable gear, ruined his time, and… and…“Now you’re done. Come home.”The medic throws the first punch.—-The city is a blade’s edge, and this war is about to drag it from tongue to tip.Sungo does not know when he will see him again.—The star screams. —Tonight, Sungo is drunk.The Curan in Sungo’s dreams is pleasant.Curan, like his grandfather, is an angry drunk.“You’re fixing people up so that they can go back to killing each other!”“The next wee bird that comes intae yer line of sight!”“You’re not a fucking peacekeeper. You’re a coward!”“That cunt is two hundred! We live in an age where Kunlanders get to live to two hundred, and us? We’re lucky to make it to eighty,”“Tell me the last time you met a Naian over sixty!”“You are a Kunlander!”“Not anymore than you!”“Nobody built on the Dead zone!”The Calling.“Ka Linh!” “Means kill yourself!”—-
“No! No! No!” Curan shouts and screams.It is only a half-second later that Tsun Go Rang is dead.—-“Curan to Sungo! CURAN TO SUNGO!”“SAIRE TO SUNGO!”