Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tom likes it when they go into town together. Naturally he would; he likes spending time with the man to whom he is, apparently, now entirely and absurdly married—and he’s still working to get his mind around the new connotations the word husband has taken on—and in a context which feels in some ways more familiar even than life around the homestead. On the road again, even if the road is merely the few miles of cracked pavement between town and the path to the cabin—albeit much more relaxed and also on horseback, not on foot or by car, and horseback was never their conventional mode of transportation back in the day, but even so. On the move, together.

He also likes town. It doesn’t really have a name, at least not one everyone uses; he’s gleaned that the town that used to be nearby was known as Endwood, but that’s not a name to which anyone seems to feel any real attachment. It’s shared the fate of many small towns out this way: people moved out, buildings fell apart or burned, the place turned ghost. Then, as the situation in the Midwest improved, other people moved in, fixed up existing buildings or constructed new ones with scavenged materials, started farming and crafting and trading, and the result is a somewhat ramshackle little settlement, really far too small to be properly called a town, rough and patchwork with—as Mike described it once—a distinctly frontier-esque vibe. Most of the people here have been through shit and more than a few have left pasts to which they’d vastly prefer not to return even in conversation. There’s a rigid norm regarding minding one’s own goddamn business, but aside from that, people tend to be friendly. Everyone knows everyone.  In an unobtrusive fashion, everyone looks out for each other.

There’s a general store. A combination blacksmith/mechanic—who does a bit of jewelry on the side, and supplied his and Mike’s wedding rings. An elderly couple runs a bakery out of their home. There’s a saloon and the gray-bearded ex-biker who keeps it brews his own excellent and extremely strong beer, and he’s expressed ambition toward not only setting up a distillery but fixing up the ancient theater next door and trying to host some honest-to-god entertainment. A younger woman and her adolescent twins mend old clothes and increasingly make new ones. No money is good out here, everything is barter, and somehow that adds to the closeness of the knit.

So Tom likes it. The locals, bemused by his presence at first, have responded by almost uniformly liking him back. They all must know who he is and what he’s done, but none of them has ever mentioned it, or treated him like someone whose name has—to some—taken on a borderline messianic aura. After all, if he’s here, he’s likely trying to put it behind him.

He likes going there with Mike—to trade, and also sometimes to get a meal and a beer at the saloon, check in on whatever news has made its way out this far. But he’s also discovered that he likes going alone. Time on his own away from the work of the homestead is time to think, about specific things or about nothing in particular. To experience the road there growing comfortable and familiar, to watch the way it all changes as the seasons roll inexorably on. To see how so much of the landscape is getting wilder and wilder even as the town builds itself up and the surrounding farms become better-established, the unoccupied remains of human construction crumbling back into the earth.

This isn’t the world he thought he was fighting for, in his fighting days. He’s only realizing that now that he’s here. He cared about the people out here; in his way, he cared about everyone, and despaired at the task of ever being able to meaningfully alleviate the suffering and cruelty and privation he saw all around him. But ultimately his attention was always fixed back east, into the heart of this world’s deceptively clean and shiny Mordor, and now that the tower of Barad-dûr has fallen and his fighting is done, he’s beginning to understand just how little he was ever needed.

Myth built him up as this land’s savior. After a fashion, he may have been. But so many of the people out here are perfectly capable of making do for themselves, once given a chance and a little stability in which to construct a life. There’s no more flag to pledge allegiance to and battle under. There’s nothing more he has to do. He can be like all those abandoned ruins and fade back into being no one in particular, no one special, finally allowed to become the Simple Man that myth made him out to be.

Now and then he thinks back to what the Native American man said in Cincinnati all those years ago. There’s only land now.

He didn’t understand, then, what the man was really saying. Now he hopes that man and his people—and everyone like them—have their land and the freedom of it, and get to keep that freedom in peace.

So he thinks about the past on these short journeys alone, from time to time. But it never comes back to him aside from that.

Until it does.

~

He leaves Laika in the paddock after a quick brushdown, shoulders his pack and makes his way back to the cabin. He’s bringing a couple of specialty items along with the necessities he went for—more coffee, wonder of wonders, and a loaf of pound cake from the bakery—and also something he never anticipated.

And doesn’t entirely know what to make of.

The cabin proves empty, as does the goat pen and the shed, and Tom leaves his pack on the table and exits, down the porch steps and back into the forest along a rough footpath. He already has a fairly good idea of where Mike will be, and when the dull clacking sound of stone on stone and a strained grunt come to him through the trees, it’s confirmed.

He smiles. Winces a little at a particularly loud impact and a sharp string of obscenities.

Halts, then, when Mike comes into view a few yards away, working on the bank of the little creek they occasionally use for makeshift refrigeration, and allows himself the luxury of looking at his husband—husband, good lord—while yet unnoticed.

The springhouse is still not remotely identifiable as a house of any kind. The trench is dug and its stones are laid, much of the floor is in place, but while most of the stone for the walls has been acquired, the walls themselves haven’t yet taken shape. Mike is working at a pile of that stone and has obviously been shifting it closer to the frame, and while the season is well into autumn and the air is cool, he’s stripped to the waist and his skin is gleaming with sweat, tinted gold in the low sun.

He’s paused, straightening, and he pulls off his right work glove with a frustrated yank and scowls at his fingers.

It’s still so endlessly strange, even after a year and a half now, to look at this man in this way and feel not merely admiration but a deep stirring of desire.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound at all as far as he can tell, but Mike must sense his presence all the same, because he snaps his head up and transfers the scowl to Tom, shaking out his hand.

“Help you with something?”

Tom sighs and resumes his progress, reaches Mike and holds out his own hand. “Lemme see what you’ve done to yourself.”

“I didn’t do shit. It was gravity.” But he sullenly extends his bare hand for Tom to examine. “And it was them or my fuckin’ toes.”

“I told you to wait till I was here.” Mike’s ring and middle fingers are angry red and the skin under the nails might turn an interesting color in the next couple of days, but otherwise they’re none the worse for wear. Tom tips him an amused smile. “I think you’ll live. You want me to kiss them better?”

Mike rolls his eyes, snatches his hand away and pulls the glove back on. “Isn’t there literally anything else you could be doing right now?”

“Sure. I could be helping you.”

“You just got back.” Mike pauses, half turned back to the stones, and the look he gives Tom is softer. “Take a load off, I’m fine.”

“Oh, hey, yeah.” He had been about to argue, about to jog back to the cabin to get his own pair of gloves, but this is too interesting—and too puzzling—to wait on. “About that. You’ll never guess who I saw at the store.”

Mike crouches, hefts a wide chunk of limestone. “Who?”

“Guess.”

“Nah.” Grunt. “I don’t think I will.”

Tom huffs a laugh. “Yeah, you never would’ve gotten it anyway. Sam. I saw Sam.”

Mike glances up, brows rising—faint, surprised smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he makes the connection. “No shit? Jesus, what the fuck’re they doing all the way over here?”

“They were with this big trading caravan. Bunch of people, from all over. They said we’ll probably see more of that kind of thing, lot of ‘em are starting to do it that way now. Every now and then someone peels off, someone else joins, the whole thing is safer. Anyway, they said pretty much everyone at the settlement is doing fine, they’ve made it a town bigger than ours now. Said to say hello.” Tom grins. “I got something from them, too.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll show you later,” Tom says primly. Along with the coffee and the pound cake: a sizable bottle of real honest-to-Christ Kentucky bourbon.

He had tried to offer some honey in exchange for it. Sam waved him off. Take it and we’ll call it even.

“There a reason you’re being so obnoxious today?”

“I’m in a good mood,” Tom says, emphasizing this with extra sprightliness in his tone. “Kinda weird, though—they had a message specifically for you. I asked how they knew you were here, they just said they’ve been watching out for any sign of you as they go.” He frowns slightly. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Sam neither, but they said they were told you’d understand it.”

Mike straightens again, wiping sweat off his brow with his forearm and surveying the floor’s frame. “And the message is?”

“It’s from Grace.” Tom pauses, studying Mike—noting when something in the set of his shoulders tenses minutely and shifts. “You remember Grace? With the two kids. She said to tell you… ‘It does make a difference.’”

Mike doesn’t move. He stands, facing mostly away, his focus difficult to discern. Finally he releases a long breath and seems to loosen, ducks his head and closes his eyes.

“Alright.”

“So…” Tom cocks his head, pauses. “You wanna clue me in?”

Mike and Grace have no history or special connection that Tom is aware of, aside from the fact that he and Tom saw her children safely returned to her. Mike himself wasn’t even there for that part, the moment of reunion.

Had appeared to make a point of not being there, come to think of it.

Now Mike is tensing again, shooting Tom a look over his shoulder, and Tom doesn’t miss the subtle wariness in him—which he now understands is almost entirely instinctive. Being forthcoming about certain parts of the past still doesn’t come naturally to him, still requires effort and intention.

Likely always will.

“You don’t have to,” Tom adds quietly. Because Mike doesn’t. If he needs time, if he doesn’t feel ready to broach this subject, it can wait. “If it’s something you’re not comfortable with, if—”

“No. No, it’s fine.” Mike exhales again, waves a hand at him. “It’s just… It’s kind of a whole thing.” He gestures at the creek before Tom can say anything further. “Get me a beer outta there and sit down and be quiet.”

“Okay,” Tom murmurs, and makes a bit of a show of meekness as he fetches a squat brown bottle from the burbling water and brings it back, hands it to Mike and takes a seat on a low stack of lumber. Folds his hands on his knees and waits expectantly.

Mike casts his eyes heavenward as if praying for patience as he uncaps the bottle on the edge of the limestone and takes a swig, wipes his mouth on the back of his glove—and for a moment says nothing. All affected exasperation is gone. A kind of density has seeped into the air, something in the quality of the light.

The past returning, Tom thinks. It can be like that, sometimes. An external, observable phenomenon, like a shift in the mood of the world.

“You remember how we found them,” Mike says, turning the bottle in his hand. “Sam’s group. You remember how they were—”

The past returning, yes, and sweeping over them like a cool breeze, Tom’s own version of it…

…and other things he never knew until now.

~

They don’t know it yet, but victory is less than a year away. When it begins in earnest it’ll happen with shocking rapidity, the dominos tipping at an exponentially increasing pace—because every tyrant’s regime is ultimately hollow at the core, and when they fall, they fall fast and they fall hard.

But now it’s difficult to see that. Difficult to have faith that it’s possible. They’re years into this fight already—three, four, possibly more, because the years have no distinction from each other but are instead smeared into a grinding, relentless, exhausting, bloody stretch of time. Their little band of three expanded to nine and then to sixteen and then to twenty-eight, and in the coming months it’ll expand further still, and the scruffy shoestring insurgency they’ve managed to assemble will become battle-hardened and grimly determined, and when they aren’t fueled by faith they’ll be fueled by cold, bone-deep anger and by the freedom inherent in having nothing left to lose.

And they’ll hold it all together, the three of them. Florence with her silent, loving ruthlessness, Tom with a level of calm, authoritative command he never would have suspected was in him, and Mike…

Tom understands much better now, what was in Mike then. On the surface, his own grim determination. His lack of anything much to lose. But also his own sort of command, about which Tom always sensed he was profoundly ambivalent—because it was rougher, harsher, and the discipline he demanded from their people was enforced with a kind of brutality that Tom needed—more than once—to gainsay.

Noting, when he did, that Mike’s punishments were at their most severe when—in Mike’s estimation, and always Tom agreed—someone crossed a line in the violence they all had to perform. When someone lost control, out of frustration or stress or anger and fear, and went too far. Seemed to indulge in it.

The look on Mike’s face the last time Tom pulled him aside to talk to him about it, one night in camp: early spring, a severe late cold snap, their breath steaming in the air, the fires barely able to restore feeling to numb extremities. Mike’s eyes, the intensity in them, and beneath the intensity, something darker and heavier that Tom thought might be close to dread.

I’m trying to fucking save them, he said.

And Tom didn’t speak to him about it again.

So there was that. Tom was in command, Tom ultimately gave the orders, but Mike was the enforcer. Mike kept them all in line, and while Tom was the open hand, Mike was the fist. And people remarked on that; Tom heard them. That they were such a curious team—the three of them, but especially the two men. Complementary. And Mike’s strange, hard-edged loyalty, grown improbably out of what had first appeared as resentful obligation. At which Tom looks back and perceives in its fullness, in what Mike allowed him to see and what Mike succeeded in concealing.

Not merely loyalty but devotion. Hopeless devotion.

Despairing love.

Victory is less than a year away, but for now they’re barely strong enough to ever strike openly. It’s all guerrilla hit-and-run, often raiding for ammunition and other material, and never meaningfully claiming any territory. It’s early in what’s already a brutal winter, what will be a long one into the bargain, and for the moment—for the sake of nimbleness and stealth—they’ve eschewed vehicles. Mike has stashed the car wherever he appears to find for stashing purposes when needed and they’re moving on foot through what used to be West Virginia, the mountains and the hollows. Two days ago they hit an outpost, killed six Republican Guard but the other two ran, so they can’t afford to stick around. They’re moving, keeping their heads down, looking for a place to hole up until the weather eases. Trying to avoid any further entanglements which might complicate things.

Until they can’t.

They’re close to the ruins of one of the innumerable mining towns that line the valleys when they hear the gunfire and the shouts echoing off the steep slopes. Not merely shouts; screams, unmistakably the sounds of children, and Tom makes a snap decision. Mike looks at his face, looks at Florence, and elects to not push back.

Snow is thick on the ground, crusted with ice. It’s a slog. But they hurry, sliding into formation, finding cover, and the snow muffles their approach so that they see what’s happening long before the Guard have a chance to spot them.

People huddled against walls and in doorways. Just people—exhausted and hollow-eyed, and while a few are returning fire, most appear unarmed. Many are likely not capable of using weapons even if they had any. There are more than a few elderly people, and the children. A woman trying to shield a little boy, a baby swaddled against her breast. A teenage girl, her eyes wide with terror, pushing what might be her grandparents’ heads down behind a broken wall. Lumps of cloth lying in the snow, in the single main street, surrounded by spatters of red. A couple of them twitch and groan. Difficult to count their total, but Tom calculates what he can, puts the number at close to twenty.

It’s confounding, why the Guard would be going at them like this, with this level of intensity. What would make this ragged band of refugees worth all the bullets.

But apparently they are worth it. So Tom decides they’re worth his as well.

At first the people react with fresh fear, certain they’re now getting it from both sides. But then they understand, they hear the barks to get down and keep back, and they do as they’re told. A few of the Guard are shooting from cover but seven or eight others have begun advancing, and a humvee with a mounted gun creeps along behind them, pulverizing brick and concrete. There’s an initial surprised pause when they find themselves suddenly met with so much more force than they had been, but they recover fast. They’re trained well.

Tom and Mike and Florence have trained their own people well, too. And more than a few of them once wore that drab green uniform and red beret, in another life.

It takes a while to push them back. It takes a while to flank the humvee and take out the gunner. But they grind away, and their numbers are greater, their determination greater, and in the end someone calls retreat. The Guard are still shooting, but they’re shooting as they pull back, the humvee speeding off through the snow, and at last there’s silence.

Except for weeping, and the groans of the surviving wounded.

Slowly, the refugees assemble. Florence moves among them with their two medics, doing what she can. One of the lumps of cloth in the snow is no longer there, leaving only blood and the imprint of a body. The others are in bad shape, and she’ll be nearly too weary to walk by the time she’s finished.

Some people are still in cover, too frightened and confused to emerge. In scattered clots, they’re drawn out. And here, something Tom did not see: At the end of an alley, a small girl curled in a pile of rubble, and an older boy—surely not more than twelve or thirteen—shielding her with his own body. Turning his head to see the man looming over him, his sharp green eyes flicking to the gun in the man’s hand, and his face hardening with defiance even as he trembles.

Something especially fiery in that defiance. Something even more frozen in the new, shocked terror that seems to grip him—and then he ceases trembling, and beneath his defiance, the terror fades into something that looks for all the world like despair.

But that hard veneer on the boy’s face cracks in his own confusion when the man lowers the gun and offers him a gloved hand, and then after a few seconds thrusts the hand forward with an impatient grunt.

“C’mon, unless you wanna fuckin’ stay here.”

Hesitantly, the boy accepts it. Is yanked to his feet. Mike waits long enough to be sure that he’s unhurt, that the little girl is as well, and jerks his head in the direction of the street before striding away.

Later, he understands what he saw in the boy’s eyes—the shock and the ensuing despair. But not now. Now, he dismisses it and goes to join the others, and he doesn’t bother to look back to be certain that the children are following him.

~

The people with guns—two rifles and four pistols—turn out to be why this group was worth the bullets. The group’s leader explains, the group circled silently around them—the leader appears to be a Black woman with close-cropped hair, but at the first quiet opportunity they correct Tom’s misapprehension, and Tom doesn’t quite get it, the pronouns or any of the rest of it, but he’s never needed to understand someone to respect them.

Sam. Sam explains. They’re from a settlement a few miles away—or what used to be a settlement, before the Republican Guard burned it to the ground. They had advance word, and some of them managed to get away a day ago. Those who stayed behind to prepare further were about to follow, and then it was too late to do anything but grab what little they could and run.

Three of the armed ones—two women and a man—are recent deserters. That’s why. For General Omar Santiago, desertion is a sin he has no interest in forgiving. He doesn’t make it a high priority to hunt down those who do so, but when the opportunity arises, it’s understood that they’re to be made an example of.

Them and whoever harbors them.

“You can’t stay here,” Tom tells Sam, and two of his men standing close by murmur knowing agreement. “And you can’t go back. They might not come after you again, but—”

Sam barks a bitter laugh. “Go back to what?” They nod at the road leading out of town. “We were following the others. We set up a rendezvous in Kentucky, we were trying to get there.”

“They’ll track you.” Mike’s tone is flat. “The snow’ll make that real fuckin’ easy. They’ll mount your heads on posts.”

Sam’s jaw tenses. “We can fight.”

Mike snorts, shakes his head. “You got old folks and kids. They have vehicles, you don’t stand a goddamn chance.”

 Sam looks ready to argue, but a man standing next to them touches their shoulder, and they hesitate. They glance around at the armed people beside them.

“Give me a sec.”

They withdraw to confer with the others. Tom looks back at his own people—sees Florence coming toward him, half supported by one of the medics. She gives him a weak smile when she meets him, and her exhaustion is plain in her hands when she signs.

Couldn’t save one. The others will make it. Our own… She pulls in a heavy breath. Six wounded. None bad.

Tom nods, squeezes her upper arm. “You should rest,” he says, his hands accompanying the spoken words as he’s become accustomed to.

I’ll rest when we stop for the night. She gives Mike a look Tom can’t quite read—and Mike can. She’s anticipating his resistance, and cautioning him against it.

We should help them, she signs.

Tom gives her another nod. “We can’t just leave them.”

Mike exhales. When he speaks, his movements are brusque and clipped. “No,” he says, and Tom can discern that his exasperation is cover for his own tiredness, and that in his tiredness is agreement. Whatever hard edges might remain in him—and they remain in spades—the truth is that his days of scoffing and writing off people like these, of let ‘em look out for themselves, are long over.

He cares now. He fought it for as long as he could, but in the end it broke him, broke into him, and now—God fucking help him, he knows it’ll likely ruin him—he cares.

“No. We can’t.”

~

Five minutes later, Sam returns to them with a proposal, and it’s essentially the one Tom would have made if they hadn’t offered it first.

“Escort us,” they say simply. “Get us to the rendezvous safe, and the three deserters will join up with you once we’re there.”

Tom shakes his head. He was watching them in the interim, noted how one of the women had joined another one and embraced her, kissed her, and the man had dropped to one knee to hug a young girl. These people aren’t here among the civilians only for safe harbor. “You don’t have to do that.”

“We want to,” says one of the women. She clears her throat, looks at the others, brushes her red hair back from her face. “You’re him, aren’t you?” she adds, her voice dropping. “You’re the one who’s—”

“I’m trying to change things,” Tom cuts in, a little sharper than he intended. In truth, he’s losing patience with this. It’s eating away at him. Every time someone says it, even alludes to it, the gnawing gets more persistent. “That’s all. I’m trying to make things better.”

Sam shrugs. “Whatever. They’ll help you, that’s the point. Fair exchange.”

Tom studies them, considering. Looks over at Mike. Mike gives him the smallest of nods.

They can use every weapon and every hand to wield it. They’re in the thick of it now.

“All right,” Tom says, turning back to them. “Get everyone ready to move. We need to be as deep in the hollows as possible by nightfall.”

~

“Be honest.”

Mike arches a brow, takes a swallow of beer. He’s seated crosslegged in a patch of shade near where Tom has settled himself, and while he hasn’t put his shirt back on, his gloves are off and Tom gets the sense that the work here, at least, might be done for the day.

“About?”

“What you thought about it.” Tom gestures at Mike with his own beer. “Helping them. I know what you’d think about it now, I mean what you thought at the time.”

“Just told you, didn’t I?” Thin smile. “I cared. Didn’t want to, but I fucking did. What the hell else were we supposed to do?”

Tom narrows his eyes, skeptical. “Was it really that simple?”

Mike doesn’t answer immediately. He’s looking off though the trees, at nothing that Tom can discern, and gnawing pensively at his lip.

Finally: “Yeah. It was. And no.” He shakes his head, mouth twisting in another, more pained smile, and blows out a breath. “It wasn’t anywhere near that simple. You told them you wanted to make things better. I’d been listening to you say shit like that for months, and I still didn’t know what the fuck you meant. Wasn’t remotely sure you did, either. Taking out Santiago, yeah, fine, that much. But besides that? After?” He rolls a shoulder. “We didn’t have a plan for after. It was really starting to fuckin’ bug me that we didn’t have a plan for after. You know what happens, when people have a revolution with no plan for after?”

“A lot of people die.” Tom lowers his eyes. “And usually the worst people end up in charge.” It hurts to remember this—the uncertainty he was struggling so hard to hide from their people, the fear, the creeping dread. What might become mounting panic. The night he burned his letters in a paroxysm of furious, impotent grief, howled silently at himself to know what he was even fighting for. He wasn’t George goddamn Washington. He wasn’t a statesman. He wasn’t a president, he wasn’t a prime minister, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be a fucking king.

He just wanted to go home. And he had no idea where home was anymore.

If he could have gone to Mike then. Gone to him, lanced himself and forced out the poison simmering inside him, crumpled and laid his head on Mike’s shoulder and let it all go. If Mike had been able to allow himself to offer that kind of comfort. Not even sex, necessarily; simply the two of them together in the dark, no barriers between them, each seeing the other completely and without judgment and no longer through a dingy, clouded window.

Then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Instead he carried it alone, that burden. And Mike carried his, and neither of them needed to, and sometimes it makes him so desperately angry.

What Mike said to him that night near the waterfall, choked it out through his tears.

I wasted so much time.

Mike is nodding. “A lotta people die,” he echoes. “And the worst assholes end up in charge. I was scared for you. Y’know? I was really fucking scared that we might win, and we’d still end up… losing. And I didn’t know what that would do to you. So you said you wanted to make things better, and I was like… Yeah, sure. Why not? Let’s make things better while we can. Even a little, even for a few people. Maybe it’s bullshit. Maybe it means nothing. Hell, maybe it gets us all killed. It’s still something. It’s still this… tiny, definite win.” His smile widens, turns crooked. “Plus I knew you well enough by then to know when it was totally fucking pointless to argue.”

Tom breaks into a low laugh, kicks a few pebbles in Mike’s direction. Drinks his beer and is content to let the silence settle for a moment.

“I asked you about where the others were on it,” he says presently. “That night in camp. You said—”

“Few grumbles. Nothing more.”

“Was that true?”

“I never lied to you about any of that shit,” Mike says softly. “Never kept the truth from you. Never sugar-coated. Not ever.”

“No,” Tom murmurs. “I guess you wouldn’t have.” Of course he wouldn’t have. The workings of Mike’s own mind and heart were one thing; the state of play among the rank and file was always entirely something else. Mike would have regarded honesty there as a plain necessity, and a lack of it as stupid as well as dangerous.

And he would have respected Tom far too much for that. Only dictators demand to be spared bad news.

“They were on board,” Mike continues. “How could they not be, when plenty of ‘em had their own kids? Or used to. Not that it made any of it easier.”

“That first night was hard.” Tom nods. “And the rest were—”

~

The first night is hard. Hard going up the slopes, keeping to the cover of the naked trees—the remains of the roads are barely more passable, but they can’t chance making it easier for them to be followed. Up and up through ravines and scrambling over rocks, more than once past what looks, in the fading light, as though it might be the entrance to one of the mines.

Tom considers the mines for only a few seconds before concluding that it would be a potential death trap. No easy exit, if any at all. Darkness and possibly hazardous air, and tunnel collapses far too likely. If the Guard found them, all they’d have to do is herd everyone further in and seal the entrance, and let gravity or thirst or starvation or all three take care of the problem for them.

There’s less shelter outside, but more of a chance.

They finally stop near a frozen trickle of a waterfall, where one of the deeper ravines concludes in a wider depression. Still more boxed-in than Tom would like, and Mike grimly makes it clear that he agrees, but there’s sufficient space and protection from the wind and a bit of a rocky overhang, and enough sightline cover that they might be able to hazard a couple of fires.

It’s cold. It’ll get much, much colder.

People settle themselves, clustering in groups of family and friends, some talking in low tones but most silent and shivering and exhausted. Some are softly crying. Their little band of insurgents surrounds the others, tucked against the ravine walls, volunteers climbing to the top to take first watch.

With Dexter trotting at his heels, Tom moves among the refugees, Mike accompanying but keeping a bit of wordless, keen-eyed distance—not exactly a bodyguard, but not exactly not a bodyguard, either. Tom talks, listens, and a few things quickly become clear.

When the people fled, they didn’t do so completely unprepared, but they haven’t brought nearly enough supplies for the journey they’ll have to make. There isn’t adequate food, and not everyone has the warm clothes they’ll likely need. Medical gear is practically nonexistent. He notes, with a dim sinking feeling, that his own people will have to share what they have—which is pitiful even after the raid on the outpost, and what they recovered there will go fast.

He also establishes that this is not in fact the population of a single settlement, but two—close enough to be aware of each other and to be endangered by the same threat, but distant enough that not everyone knows everyone else, or feels the same mutual obligation. Now that the acute threat has subsided, he’s watching people draw into their own smaller groups, guarding what they have, and he glumly concludes that most of them won’t be especially amenable to any suggestion that they should share supplies equally among themselves. If he pressed the issue, they’d likely comply—what choice do they have?—but still.

Some people are on their own. A few manage to join a group, huddling around their fire. A few more don’t even try. They seem numb, shellshocked, and don’t respond when Tom attempts to speak to them.

Mike watches all of this, and is unsurprised. In his experience, people do pull together and cooperate when shit gets bad, but it frequently doesn’t take much to disrupt that cooperation, to damage any tenuous bonds beyond repair. When subjected to sufficient pressure, scared and traumatized people are often not well-equipped to practice altruism. And these are hardy folk—they would basically have to be, to have survived this long—but they aren’t battle-hardened. Too many of them aren’t even adults. Getting them all to where Sam says they’re going will not be easy, if it even proves possible.

He doesn’t believe that the odds that all of them will make it are high. He wonders how many of them know that. How many of them are even vaguely prepared for how bad it might get.

At the outer edge of the messy partial circle they’ve formed, he stops, hand resting on his gun, gazing up at the sky.  The daylight is almost entirely gone, and the clouds are low and ominous and seem to glow with their own internal light in a way he doesn’t at all care for. They’ve already had a week of snowfall; by his estimation, more is imminently on the way. 

Tom might be expecting him to grumble about the situation—dragging this sorry pack of liabilities all the way to Kentucky. But he isn’t, and he won’t. Once he probably would have, but things have changed, everything has changed, and now he tends to confine his grumbling to when the stakes are low and their straits are not dire. He grumbles when things are basically fine, or when grumbling might actually accomplish something.

When it’s like it is now, he’s mostly just quiet.

His core is wound up tight. It’s not quite fear and not quite dread; what he’s feeling now is far too weary and also far too seasoned to be those things. It’s simply an awful, aching tension, from which not even unconsciousness affords him relief anymore.

He’s barely forty—for at least as much as his own reckoning counts, this far from a calendar—but times like this are when he genuinely feels old.

He’s made a practice of distracting himself from such tension by keeping an eye on Tom. Which doesn’t really help. Which helps much less now that at least for the present, Sophie is, for all intents and purposes, out of the picture. Keeping an eye on Tom and wondering how much more this man can take, wondering how much more the world can pile on his shoulders before he breaks, and…

And what? Gives up? Surrenders to the hopelessness that must perennially stalk him? Or—worse, Mike has no doubt that for himself it would be much worse to witness—gives up on everything that protects his stubborn fucking decency from a relentlessly indecent world, and gets cynical and bitter and mean?

Gets like me.

Movement in the right of his peripheral vision. He turns, peering through the gloom, hand tightening reflexively on the grip of his gun—loosening when he sees what’s caught his attention.

Curled into the hollow of a gnarled and leaning tree: the kid from the alley, his arms wrapped around the girl. The girl’s eyes are closed beneath the ragged fall of her black hair, but the boy is staring up at him, face half lit by one of the fires burning low some distance away. In the boy’s one visible eye gleams a ghost of what Mike saw before—the fear, the despair, and finally the defiance.

The defiance most of all.

Mike studies him, bemused. It’s unclear what the kid thinks he’s defying. It’s also unclear why they’re out here so far from the others and the meager warmth of their fires.

There is one way in which he might discover that information.

“Why the fuck’re you all the way out here?”

The boy’s jaw stiffens. Otherwise he doesn’t answer. Mike notes the threadbare quality of his coat, the patches on the little girl’s pants. She’s opening her eyes and rubbing sleepily at her face with a mittened hand, looking up at the man standing over her with a combination of wariness and faint hope.

“‘m hungry,” she murmurs.

The boy shushes her, pulls her closer. He hasn’t shifted his eyes from Mike’s face. He also doesn’t appear to be interested in explaining himself. Mike sighs.

“You got anyone around? Mom, dad?”

“They said Mommy was dead,” the girl says, and her tone is astonishingly matter-of-fact, but at the last word she hiccups a sob and turns her face against the boy’s neck.

“She’s not,” the boy hisses fiercely. “That wasn’t true, she isn’t. We’ll find her.” He glares at Mike. “We’re fine. We don’t need your help.”

Mike regards the two in silence for a moment. The poorly-moderated paranoia isn’t altogether out of place in this context, especially if the boy now considers himself wholly responsible for what Mike gathers, from the closeness and the resemblance, is his little sister. Clearly no one here has taken them under any kind of wing—and in spite of himself, he feels a prickle of anger at that. Sure, people look out for their own first and foremost. But the boy must be barely into his teens if even that, and the little girl doesn’t appear so much as past preschool age.

Then again, someone might have tried and been rebuffed.

He blows out a breath, feels in one of his own coat pockets and pulls out a bar of chocolate. Liberated from the outpost, and he was saving it for later. Really looking forward to it, in fact; he can’t honestly recall when he last tasted real chocolate.

Oh, well. He still has the similarly liberated bottle of Laphroaig in his pack.

He drops into a crouch, holds out the chocolate. The boy eyes it mistrustfully, but the girl’s face lights up when she sees it, first with interest and then with undisguised eagerness. She reaches for it before her brother can stop her, and Mike gives the boy an exasperated look as he hands it over.

“You gotta get further in, get a spot by a fire.”

“Don’t you tell me what we have to fucking do.”

Mike’s eyebrows creep upward a touch. Impressive, those balls. In time they might serve the kid well, if they don’t get him killed first.

“Temp’s dropping fast,” he says brusquely, as though the boy didn’t say anything at all. “You could freeze. As in die. I’m not kidding, get the hell back in there or I’ll drag your ass in.”

The boy opens his mouth, but his eyes flick to the circle of fires, uncertainty clear in his features. Anxiety. Jesus, Mike thinks. He really doesn’t have anyone.

And he’s holding it together, all the same. Not for himself but for what might be the only family he has left.

“Get yourself a place,” Mike says, a touch gentler, and nods at the fires. “Anyone gives you any trouble, come find me. Or him.” Pointing at Tom, who’s bending to speak to an elderly woman. “Go on, don’t make me tell you again.”

For another long moment, the boy doesn’t respond, even as the girl tears into the chocolate. Doesn’t move. Then, at last, he gets to his feet and reaches down for the girl. Together they move toward the fire glow, two terribly small silhouettes walking hand in hand. Mike straightens, watching them go and experiencing a sense of rapidly encroaching doom.

You cannot become specifically responsible for them. Responsible for all of them in the most general sense, fine. Or not fine, but fine. But not specifically. Not in particular. That way lies madness.

“Bit fuckin’ late for that,” he mutters as his gaze lands on Tom again, and he turns and begins to climb up the slope to speak to the ones on watch.

~

“I noticed you talking to him that night,” Tom says, thoughtful. “I forgot until now. I mean, I noticed later that you were kind of sticking close to the two of them, and then we—”

“You gave me shit for it,” Mike cuts in, the corner of his mouth curling as he drains the last of his beer. He’s sitting in the sun now, a last golden spill of it as it sinks through the trees toward the horizon, and Tom knows they should both get back, there are a few more things to be done before dinner, but it’s good to be out here like this, drinking and comfortable and talking about the past like the past isn’t a ghost dragging chains through their heads, or something fiery and volatile that’s as likely to whip around and bite them as set their nerves alight.

It’s merely shit that happened to them, that they share. Most of it hard, some of it bad, but by no means all.

“You had her on your shoulders,” Tom points out, gesturing with his bottle. “It was fucking adorable. I’m getting another one of these, you want one too?”

Mike rolls his eyes. “We were all freezing and starving and trying to not get shot, and she was literally too weak to fucking walk anymore. Yeah, sure.”

Tom chuckles as he pushes to his feet, makes his way toward the water. The facts of the context as Mike laid them out are accurate, and as miserable as his description would indicate. But it’s also accurate that Tom gave him shit for it, as Mike put it—teased him a little when they finally made camp and had a moment to check in with each other. It was the sort of thin, worn-down teasing that he used to lighten things when the weight of everything began piling up beyond the point of bearing it easily, and while Mike reliably reacted with annoyance, Tom could usually tell that it was having the desired effect.

Mike was always more at ease when he could focus on being annoyed at Tom. In many ways that hasn’t changed.

A stream of hungry, cold, exhausted people staggering across country through the snow, under a dense gray sky that threatened to make their lives even harder. It was the third day of traveling, Tom recalls as he bends to retrieve the bottles from the creek. Or maybe second… But no, it would have been the third, because the little girl’s spirits were still reasonably high on the second day. He remembers Dexter running up to her that morning in the ravine, nosing at her hands, and her laughing as she scratched behind his ears.

By the third day, things were starting to get bad.

The image comes to him, sharply vivid as he stands and is momentarily blinded by a shaft of sunlight. On the third day they were nearly caught. Had to run, and many of the civilians were in no shape to run any significant distance in the best of circumstances, let alone over dramatic elevation changes through thick snow. Then, when they could stop running, they still had to walk—and walk as fast as they could—and the wind was picking up, no longer nipping at their extremities but snapping like an angry dog.

The boy—Logan, his name was Logan, and his sister Kristie—pulling his sister along by the hand even as she flagged, as they both did. Then Tom turned just in time to see her go down, and her brother was trying to get her back on her feet and failing, and Tom wasn’t close but he was near enough to make out the naked distress on the boy’s face, and to see that no one near them seemed inclined to pause their slogging progress to help.

Tom was poised to go back. Looking around for Florence. But Mike was stepping forward, Mike was reaching briskly down and batting Logan aside, lifting the little girl up as though she weighed practically nothing and setting her on his shoulders, and it was such an absurdly domestic element in such a bleak picture that Tom nearly burst out laughing.

Is laughing to himself now as he heads back to the construction site. It’s horrible, so much of that image, but that’s why it’s funny. So much exhaustion and pain, so many people stretched to the absolute limit of what they could bear, fleeing death with no safety certain ahead, and a grim-faced man carrying a little girl on his shoulders with a boy at his side and a small dog at his heels. Keep the dog and the girl and the boy, get rid of the brutal cold and the refugees, the hunger and exhaustion, the grim face, and replace the setting with a sun-warmed park or a playground, and it might be a father out with his kids for the afternoon. Mike Pinocchio out with his kids for the afternoon—which is its own layer of comedic absurdity.

And yet maybe not so funny after all. Maybe something else. Another one of those surreal moments of doubling, one possible alternative path overlaying another. A life Mike never got to have. Probably never really wanted, but even so.

Mike gives him a quizzical look as he accepts the beer. “What?”

Tom blinks at him. “What do you mean, what?”

“Your face.” Mike gestures at his own, his eyes narrowing a bit. “It was doing a thing.”

“Oh, was it?”

“Yeah. Like a fuck of a lot of feelings, and also not totally here. That kinda thing.” Mike opens the bottle against one of the stones. “You were thinking about that day, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Tom says quietly, returning to his seat and opening his own bottle. “I guess I was.”

Not their worst day. Far from their best. It was another day, in many ways not unlike hundreds of others. It’s set apart in his mind largely by that moment, that incongruous image of a man who had never made a secret of how little he enjoyed the company of children carrying a small child on his shoulders.

“Why did you latch onto them like that?” he asks suddenly, looking up. “Was it just that they were on their own, or was it—”

“Some of it was that, yeah.” Mike grunts, drinks, seems to ruminate for a moment. “Some. I don’t think all.”

“Because they weren’t on their own the whole time,” Tom continues. By the end of the second day, he had succeeded in getting them hooked up with a middle-aged couple whose own son—an adult, albeit a young one—was in the first group to run, and they had agreed to keep an eye on the pair, do what they could.

But the boy didn’t seem thrilled with the arrangement, and continued to keep mostly to himself. And to his sister.

“Yeah, like I said. I don’t think that was all of it.” Mike is silent for a few seconds, gazing down at the bottle in his hands. “I dunno,” he says at last, shrugs. “I mean it. I’d tell you if I did. I don’t know what it was. Unless…”

Tom waits for him to pick up the trail. When he doesn’t, Tom leans forward, studying him.

“Unless…?”

Mike shakes his head. “Not yet. I’ll get there.”

~

We’ll get there.

Sam insists it, Sam tells them over and over to bolster their will, but its effectiveness is waning. Sam is good at leading their people; Tom can tell that much. But by the end of the third day, he imagines even the best leader would be struggling. They don’t stop moving until there’s literally not enough light to make moving possible, and people practically drop where they’re standing, searching feebly around for any firewood they can find. Tom watches them with tired dismay; fires are risky, they’ve been risky this whole time, and as they’ve started to move out of the mountains and the ground has begun to level out here and there, the risk is correspondingly increasing.

But they’re all so cold. And there’s no shelter. And the temperature just keeps on plunging.

Making his own pathetic little fire, looking up when someone drops a bundle of twigs beside the patch of ground he’s cleared. Florence follows it, crouching in front of him and starting to help him build.

“It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart,” he murmurs. Looking out at all those dark shapes clustered around their fires, the drawn, gaunt faces. He might mean that it’s getting harder to tell one of them from the other, that their common desperation is lending them all an increasingly common appearance, but—

Florence nods. Us from them.

“Yeah.” Tom exhales heavily, rummages in his pack for his canteen. “We have the weapons. That’s about it, anymore. We’re all just… grinding down. It’s not even this—this mission. It’s more than that.” He stares into the flames for a moment, the canteen forgotten in his lap. “I think it’s going to be a bad winter,” he whispers.

Another nod. Dexter walks over to her and nuzzles at her knee, settles beside her thigh with a soft whuff and lays his nose on his paws.

Florence strokes his flank, gives Tom a faint, sad smile. We keep going.

“We keep going,” he echoes, and then falls silent, speaking only in sign.

It’s what we do.

~

Mike is more tired than he’s been in longer than he can remember.

Weariness is such a feature of his life, has been for so many weeks and months and years, but this is more, this is worse, and most of it is likely the days of inadequate food and the relentless cold, but he doesn’t believe that’s all.

Before, he felt tired and old; now he feels heavy. Down in his bones, he feels so fucking heavy. Like someone is filling his marrow with lead.

In spite of this—no, not in spite of it; because of it, although that makes not one lick of goddamn sense—sleep darts away from him every time he tries to catch it. He can’t stay still, he can’t just lie there and shiver, so he’s up and moving, trying to work some warmth back into these heavy bones of his, maybe tire himself out to a point where unconsciousness will be  attainable.

There’s the scotch, but. Somehow he suspects the scotch wouldn’t do the trick, and it’s too good to waste.

He’s moving through their makeshift camp, quiet as he can be, scanning around him as he goes. Their own people are holding up, but he hasn’t seen them under this kind of persistent strain before, and he’s uneasy about it. But it’s a test, and the tests were always coming, and maybe it’s better to know sooner than later who can bear up under it and who doesn’t have what it takes.

He pauses to exchange a word with the ones who are wakeful—because they simply are, like him, or because they have to be, because their watch shifts are either just ending or just beginning. Martinez, whose customary quick wit and quick smile have been AWOL over the last couple of days as she’s shaken off everything that doesn’t absolutely require her energy. Anderson, who’s stolid and steady at the best of times and is maintaining those qualities now. Singh, who’s jovial when his spirits are high and quiet when they’re low but who never seems to slow his pace no matter what he runs into. Park, who started off her time with them jumpy and nervous to the point where Mike was positive she was nothing but a liability, until she worked the nerves out and proved herself one of the strongest of them—and, infuriatingly, also proved Tom’s early evaluation of her to be correct. Cohen, whose smooth, clear singing has been a regular feature of their better evenings—which Mike is finding that he misses more than he might have expected. O’Connell, who he fucked the first night she was with them—hasty and fumbling and more than half drunk, really the closest to accidental that fucking can get—and the next morning they arrived at a mutual agreement to put it away and not repeat it and not speak about it again, not because he doesn’t like her or respect her or find her attractive, but because he can’t do that with people who serve under him, he simply can’t… And it’s insane, he never would have expected to find himself in that position again, never would have desired it, but that is more or less the state of affairs.

He commands these people. He didn’t want to, but he does.

And he’s beginning to love them.

It’s not the first time it’s hit him, but now it does so with unusual force—standing in the dark, the steady puffs of steam marking his exhalation stuttering as the intensity of it grips him. He loves them and he feels that he owes them, he owes them the obligation of anyone who commands—to not do what was done to him, which was to decide, after being trusted with his service and his body and his heart, to send him and his men across an ocean to kill and die for oil. For the stupid gain of the rich and comfortable. And then with Santiago—what was he sending his people out to kill and die for?

About all Mike can say for himself now is that at least he was out there with them.

He owes it to these people to see that they aren’t misused. To hold their service as sacred. He’s bound to them, by that trust and by his love for them, and he can’t escape it now.

That’s why he didn’t want to fucking do this, why he was so ready to get on the boat that first night and sail his ass to Venezuela or Colombia or wherever the fuck, spit-polish his extremely rusty Spanish and never look back. If he stayed with Tom Hobbes and fought beside him, fought for him, helped him build what they’ve built together, he would start to love. He wouldn’t be able to help it. He did before, on bases and battlefields alike—he loved the men beside him, loved them completely and fiercely, loved them even when he couldn’t fucking stand them.

His love for those men—his buddies, his comrades, his fucking brothers—was something into which to pour his entire soul with a kind of purity that existed nowhere else in what passed for his life.

Losing that—along with his leg and his eye and a good percentage of his skin—is part of what made him want to die. He was so afraid of what finding it again might do to him. And here he is, and he’s not such an optimistic fucking idiot as to believe that all of them will come out at the end of this alive. He loves these people, and he’s going to lose them. Maybe not all, but too many. One way or another, too many.

One alone would be too many.

And none of this—none of it, Jesus fucking Christ, what is he going to do about this, he can barely stand to think about it most of the time—comes close to touching on the existential problem that Tom Hobbes presents.

In and of his infuriating, terrifying, beautiful self.

Mike groans softly. He needs to fucking sleep. Maybe the scotch after all. Shit, he’s ready to try anything. Even getting drunk, unwise as that would be, might provide some relief from his own brain.

But sleep won’t come to him. He knows that already.

All the same, he’s turning to go back to where he’s set out his bedroll and pack and give it a try anyway, when something snags his attention and he hesitates. There on the ground a few yards away, the kid and his sister have wrapped themselves up into a single tight bundle—but the blanket with which they’ve done it is thin. Perilously thin. Mike can virtually see through it.

A couple moments’ hesitation. Then he’s going to his gear and crouching by his bedroll, gathering up the spare wool blanket he was using, straightening and preparing to return to the children.

Glitter on the ground next to him. Florence, lying down but awake and gazing up at him. At the blanket in his hands.

He gives her a shrug. Fuck it. It’s not as though he’s going to use it tonight.

Back to the kids. He doesn’t wake them as he spreads the blanket over them. And he also doesn’t sense the other pair of eyes on him, tracking him as he rises and resumes his aimless, insomniac patrol.

~

Mike coughs a laugh. “You were fuckin’ watching me?”

“I wasn’t spying. I was awake, I happened to be looking in that direction. But yeah.” Tom shrugs. “Guess I was. And tell you the truth… I had no goddamn clue what to make of what I saw.”

It’s not as though Mike was heartless, nor had he never seen Mike do a good turn for someone when he had no reason to expect any personal benefit. That Mike might share a spare blanket with someone who didn’t have an adequate one—with children who didn’t have an adequate one—was not difficult to conceive of in and of itself. It was more the way it was done—the care with which he spread the blanket over them, the quiet of his movements, the purpose and intention in all of it. Like it wasn’t a grudging concession or an afterthought but instead like the act was something deeply meaningful to him.

So strange.

The possibility hits him all at once, inspiration colliding with his train of thought and spilling itself all over the tracks, and he jerks his head up. It’s so self-evident, this question. It’s bizarre that he didn’t ask it at the time.

“Did you know them? From, like…. before? Or something like that?”

Mike cocks his head. “Logan and Kristie, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I…” Mike’s head is still slightly cocked as he trails off, his gaze once more distant and his lips barely moving. Tom detects something lurking in that pause, as-yet concealed but dense enough to warp space and time around itself. Not only lurking but approaching.

“No,” he says finally. “I didn’t know them. But,” he adds, and his smile is cryptic, but it’s also strained. “Also, yeah. Yeah, they knew me. He knew me. And I didn’t recognize him, not consciously, but…” An odd light in his eyes. “On some level I think I might’ve known him too.”

~

The time he carried the girl turns out to not be the only one of its kind. Because on the fourth day, the blizzard arrives, and it crashes open over them just as they’re beginning to cross what looks like a vast stretch of open ground much too large to easily go around or avoid. It starts with a few stray flakes, the kind of very minor flurry they’ve been faced with countless times since they started this trek, but that’s sure as shit not how it ends, and it doesn’t take long to devolve into wind that lashes at their faces and exposed flesh, and snow that drives at nearly a horizontal angle. The world is so deceptively calm when they break camp not long after dawn, and when it descends on them, it does so with shocking speed.

Mike fights his way to Florence and Tom, floats the idea of turning back. But as he says it, he knows it’s a non-starter. They’re hopelessly in the midst of a whiteout. They can’t be sure of which direction they came from. If they try to backtrack, they could very well end up going in circles. It’ll be a miracle if they don’t end up doing that anyway.

Nor can they stop and wait for it to clear. They’re totally exposed to all the ferocity of the elements, and the storm could last for hours. Days. Freezing in place is not much of an alternative to freezing on the move.

Nothing for it but to keep moving and hope.

They send word along the line of their own: Keep everyone together. Whatever you do, keep everyone together. Watch for stragglers, watch for people who drop, get them up and keep them going. We can’t afford to go back and search for someone. If we lose anyone out here, they’re gone.

Tom beats back the icy weight of his dread, tucks Dexter more securely into his coat and sets his scarf-wrapped face against the wind. Of course they’re moving into the wind; not constantly, not reliably enough to use it for any sort of navigational aid, but it seems that way more often than not. It’s a freezing white hell and these people…

These people are not equal to it. He’s very, very afraid that they’re not.

Shit, maybe none of us is.

He’s known bad winters. In this moment, it rivals the worst he ever experienced. In its way, its context, it is in truth far worse than any of them; there’s no warm house to retreat to, no glowing fireplace to curl up in front of. It’s been a long time since he prayed, but he’s doing it now, a steady stream of entreaties to what he’s half convinced is an indifferent void. Just let us get everyone through this. Please. Just that. It’s not asking much.

Bare fucking minimum, just let us survive.

Mike and Florence weave through the caravan to the extent that they can—organizing, encouraging, Mike shouting orders. Mike isn’t certain what Florence is thinking or feeling in this moment, what she’s holding to in order to keep going, but he’s slipping into the familiar tight focus that comes on him at the worst times, an animalistic second-by-second fixation on survival. Only he can’t allow it to completely take him over this time, because he’s not responsible for only himself. That focus is something he’s cultivated in the Realm; instead he’s reaching back to something older, even more deeply ingrained. Moving through deserts and fields and mortar-crumbled cities, keeping his men together, heeding orders from those over him. The mission. Everything is the mission. Even when it seems hopeless, incomprehensible, there is still the fucking mission, and when the mission is all you have, you cling to it like a bit of flotsam in a raging flood. It, and the people who fight beside you.

Everyone is fighting now. The enemy here is vast and tireless, and infinitely more powerful than they could ever be.

He thinks he sees someone fall, a dim shape collapsing through the snow; he battles the wind to where he estimates they were, and finds nothing. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe they simply died as they dropped. He moves on. Someone else crumples and he catches them in time, shoves them back to their feet, buffets them forward into the arms of someone else. His hands are numb, his feet, his lips and nose. The very real possibility of frostbite occurs to him and he bats it aside.

Another falling shape. Small. He plunges toward it, already knowing who it’ll be, and finds that it’s both of them—the boy and the girl, a dim heap in the white.

No. Fuck no, he is not losing them.

He bends, somehow finds the strength to pull the girl into his arms, lifts her against his side. Gets his free hand under the boy’s arm and hauls him up, holds onto him, propels them all forward. The boy is saying something and the wind rips it away. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re moving. Breathing and moving and still here.

It’s endless, blinding, and they’re so heavy, and he can no longer feel his body, and the lead in his bones almost drags him down.

And they’re still here.

~

“I still can’t believe we made it,” Tom murmurs. “Can’t believe any of us survived.”

Mike looks away. “Not everyone did.”

~

Not everyone did. When they finally made it back under the cover of the next patch of trees, the wind easing enough to build fires and take stock of everyone, at final count they had lost five people. Four of the refugees and one of their own—McLaughlin. He was older, a seasoned fighter but he had persistent lung trouble, and it’s not altogether surprising. But he was well-liked and it casts a pall. No one speaks much, and it’s not merely how utterly drained everyone is.

A fair number don’t even take the time to eat or drink. They curl up by a fire and sleep. By morning the refugees will have lost two more—an old man and his wife, fading away pressed close together and leaving behind only twin depressions in the snow.

Tom slumps by his own fire, after barely summoning the energy to light it. Near his feet, Dexter curls and shivers. Maybe a few moments or maybe longer, and then Tom feels someone taking his hand in theirs, removing his glove; he looks up expecting to see Florence, and instead Mike is kneeling beside him, rubbing Tom’s fingers firmly between his palms.

Tom doesn’t insist that he’s fine. Doesn’t insist that Mike take care of himself. He’s too tired. He’s aware that he’s likely dancing along the edge of hypothermia if not tipping over into it. He sits there and half drowses as Mike works tingling sensation back into one hand and then the other, and builds up the fire. Sits down beside him. And it’s still so cold, cold spiked like ice through his bones and refusing to melt away, and every part of Tom’s body feels as though it’s being dragged toward the ground with four or five times gravity’s normal force, and at some point he finds that he’s leaning against Mike’s side.

Instant of tense hesitation. Then an arm circling around his shoulders, drawing him closer.

“Did I fuck up?”

Tom’s lips are still numb, at first he’s sure he slurred the words too badly to be intelligible and then wondering whether Mike will understand what he’s referring to even if the words do get across, but then Mike answers, his own voice scarcely above a battered croak, vibrating through his frame and into Tom’s and felt as much as heard.

It’s not the answer Tom would once have expected.

“You didn’t fuck up.” Pause. Then: “If it wasn’t this, it would’ve been something else.”

“I couldn’t leave them there.”

“I know.” Although Mike also knew that it could get this bad. That it likely would, one way or another. As he said, if it hadn’t been this…

Sometimes we’re just screwed regardless.

Tom turns his face against Mike’s throat—warm even through the thick coat and the scarf, and warmer with Tom’s breath. He burrows into the hollow of Mike’s body, and he isn’t thinking about it aside from the most basic instinct to seek any heat he can find. Mike isn’t pushing him away—is in fact hugging him, rubbing his shoulders and back. For circulation, but also… Also not only that.

Allowing himself something he normally wouldn’t have dared.

Eventually they’ll fall asleep like this, exhausted and embracing by a dying fire, and looking back on it years later, it wasn’t the first night they slept close for warmth, but it was the first night they spent in each other’s arms.

“You didn’t fight me on it,” Tom whispers. “When I decided to help them.”

“Of course I didn’t.”

A memory within a memory, hazy with cold and unfathomable weariness: Mike pulling him aside one foggy morning nearly a year past, once they had the fourth of their number traveling with them—Lopez, it was—and gazing Tom down with the kind of hardness that enters his eyes when he’s made a decision and genuinely isn’t going to be moved.

We need to talk.

Tom arched an eyebrow. About?

Us.

So that was disquieting, and Tom covered it with a faint smile. Oh my God, Pinocchio, are you breaking up with me?

Eyes cast heavenward. Jesus fucking Christ, can you be serious. Dick. Sigh. He crossed his arms. What I’m saying is, things are getting real now, and this can’t be command by committee. 

Tom frowned. He was beginning to get the sense of this, and he wasn’t altogether sure he was comfortable with where it was going. Although… He could see it, the logic of it. He couldn’t even really disagree with it.

You mean—

I mean I’ll tell you when I think you’re full of shit, I’ll argue when I think it’s necessary, but at the end of the day, your word has to be final. Beat of silence broken only by the murmur of the others and the soft tinny clink of breakfast dishes. That’s just how I need it to be. That’s how I need it to work, that’s how I was trained to work.

We both were, Tom said softly. This felt like a turning point. The ending of something. Losing something, maybe; an informal give-and-take dynamic he knew, to which he had become accustomed if not easily.

Nod. We both were. So you should get it. Wry, tiny, crooked smile. And last time it would’ve mattered to anyone, you outranked me, Lieutenant.

Tom pulled in a breath. You’d really trust me that much.

Yes. Absolutely no hesitation. I do.

Mike had never said anything like that before. Not remotely. Tom stared at him, in the moment lost for words.

It was a turning point. Something changed that morning. And yes, something was lost, but it didn’t take Tom long to discern what had been gained. The dynamic was no longer informal or equal, but they worked together after that, fully and completely together—clashing at times, for sure, and sometimes bitterly so, but in the end balancing each other, their respective places clear. And watching him over the course of the following weeks and months, Tom came to understand something he had sensed before but hadn’t fully articulated to himself.

Mike Pinocchio needed to serve—something, someone. He desperately needed a defining purpose, to be of use.

And Tom also understood, with an ache like grief, the many ways in which that made Mike terribly vulnerable to someone who would misuse him.

So: Advising, organizing, carrying out orders, obeying commands, and now, after one of the worst days they ever survived together, Mike is keeping the man he serves warm with his own body. Keeping him alive, and keeping himself alive in doing so. Serving what Tom meant. The future toward which he pointed. But also him.

Him more than anything.

~

“I loved you then,” Mike whispers. The sun is lighting up his eyes, gleaming on his wedding ring as he turns and turns it around his finger with his thumb. “God, I loved you so fucking much.”

~

The world thaws at the same shocking speed with which it froze. The next day dawns bright and warm, and the trees drip so much snow it’s as if they’re in the middle of a sun shower. In one sense it’s a dizzying relief, and in the other it’s a new kind of misery, because the ground is sodden and their many tramping feet quickly churn it into mud. But they’re not battling the cold. The air is gentle. It’s as though they can all finally breathe. There are smiles, scattered laughter—thin but present. People are resilient, especially when given even a shred of solid reason to hope.

Dexter trots beside Kristie and Logan, hops and nips lightly at Kristie’s hands when she works up the energy to play with him a little. Even Logan doesn’t seem so dour. But he’s still quiet, withdrawn.

Eyes locked on Mike, often.

Mike notices. Mulls it over. Begins to feel the outlines of what it is. Then begins to accept what it might mean. It isn’t the way he saw this particular chokepoint coming, but…

If it wasn’t this, it would have been something else.

~

In camp that night, Sam tells Tom that they’ll likely reach the rendezvous sometime the following day. The ground is drying and the pace is good, and they’ve seen no sign of Republican Guard since leaving the mountains. They’re not yet in the clear, but close to it. And the deal they all made is still holding. Once the journey is over, Tom can add three more to his number.

Tom takes the opportunity to speak to the three deserters, get to know them a bit. Take their measure. He likes what he sees. They left Santiago’s command for the right reasons, which is good. They feel that they owe something to make up for their time under it, which is even better. They’re committed. He believes he’ll be able to trust them.

Mike leaves him to it. Pulls away, draws back to the edges of things. Makes his own little camp away from the others, builds up his own fire, checks the lines of sight to the main camp. Makes sure they aren’t direct. He isn’t certain about what’s coming. But he has a feeling.

In his way, he’s preparing.

~

“I wondered what was up with you that night,” Tom says softly. “I mean, I figured…” He waves a hand vaguely between them. “I figured maybe you just needed time to yourself. To decompress or something.”

“Or something.” Mike gives him a small, tight smile. They’ve moved closer—or Mike has moved closer, sitting against the stone where Tom has parked himself. Slowly working on their beer, the two of them watching the sun go down. “I didn’t want you to worry.”

Tom snorts a laugh. “That does not sound like you. Not then, anyway.”

“Yeah, fair.” Mike’s smile briefly widens, loosens. “It’s true, though. We’d been through… fuck, more than enough by then. And I wanted to handle it on my own. Needed to, maybe.”

“I assume you’re gonna tell me what specifically you needed to handle.”

“I am.” But he’s quiet a moment, eyes half closed. Tom waits.

Then: “So I was cleaning my gun.”

~

He’s cleaning his gun.

Not the MP-5; he’s cleaning his pistol, slowly and methodically, laying the pieces out on the cloth he’s spread on the ground, sitting crosslegged and wiping down each one, his gaze moving idly over their firelight-edged shapes. It’s not that the task is needed so much as it is an aid to meditation, a kind of grounding. Something to focus his fraying attention on while he waits.

He’s not impatient. But somehow he suspects he won’t have to wait long.

And there: the rustle of leaves behind him—a muddy sound in the wet. The snap of a twig, which sets itself apart from the crackle of the fire. Soft, but unmistakable.

His hands don’t pause their steady motion. But he raises his head, gazes into the flames. Releases a long breath.

“If you’re gonna do it, kid, have the courtesy to do it while I’m facing you.”

Nothing. For a long moment, nothing. The low hum of talk from the main camp, the movement of people. It might as well be another world. The presence behind him is undeniable now, for all they’re doing to remain silent.

Whatever happens next is simply what will happen.

At last, the sound of movement resumes, and is less cautious. The boy emerges from the shadows, every muscle tense and wary, but at least now he’s approaching from the front.

In his hand, red-gold in the fire’s illumination, gleams a short and very sharp blade.

Mike looks at it. Looks up at the boy. His own hands are still moving, methodically reassembling the pistol. He was using it to occupy his attention, but in truth his full attention isn’t at all necessary for the task. He could do this in his fucking sleep.

“So,” he says. Casual, as though he’s discussing any old thing. “Who did I kill?”

The boy doesn’t answer immediately. He stands, turning the blade in his hand, and his face is utterly unreadable. Might be a million things churning behind his eyes; Mike would be astonished by none of it. Rage. Hatred. Fear. Confusion.

He knows all of it so well.

“My dad,” the boy says, tone utterly flat. Of course. “You came through my town one morning, you had your people line all the men up against the wall of the church and…” He draws a breath. “My mom told me not to watch. My sister wasn’t even born yet. But I was there. You don’t remember me?”

Sounding vaguely hurt. As though he hoped so much that Mike was carrying his face around in his own mind in the same way the boy has been. Haunted by it. Dreading a reckoning, maybe. Which, yes, is not entirely inaccurate. But neither is it the whole truth.

The truth is so much uglier.

Mike glances up at him again, gives him a wan smile. There is nothing about this which is not awful, and yet now that it’s arrived, it’s as though the lead in his bones is melting away. A kind of perverse relief, maybe. “I saw this movie one time,” he says slowly. “There’s this one part, the villain—this warlord asshole, y’know—he’s talking to another character, and he has this line that’s stuck with me.” He pauses, jaw working. Then: “The day I came to your village was the most important day of your life. For me it was Tuesday.”

Profundity in a stupid fucking action movie—based on a stupid fucking video game. If he laughed now, it would be the gravest mistake. But Christ, sometimes it’s all he wants to do. In a world of absurd obscenities, it feels like the only response that makes any sense.

“No,” he continues. The last pieces of the pistol are slotting neatly into place. The weight in his hand is dreadfully reassuring. Decisive. “I don’t remember you. I don’t remember your dad. The truth is I hardly remember any of it. It blurs together. It was all just… Tuesdays.”

The boy blinks at him. That defiant mask he’s been wearing this whole time is cracking again, cracking in a way that feels final, and beneath it, he’s struggling and bewildered, and to Mike he looks so hideously young. And this is all so unfair, and there is nothing in this world or any other that could ever begin to rebalance the scales.

Everything falters. The boy flicks his eyes down at the knife, shifts his stance, and finally steps backward, sinks down on a fallen log near the fire and gazes at the man sitting across from him.

The man who is calmly loading his gun.

“You weren’t the one who actually shot him.” Ridiculously, the boy is speaking almost as though he’s trying to make a case for something. He swallows. “It was—”

“Yeah, but it was still me.” Mike lifts his chin at the knife. Pulls back the pistol’s slide with a single decisive click. “So you were gonna kill me?”

The boy gives him a single nod.

“You ever kill anyone before?”

Single shake of the head.

He suspected this. But it feels like a switch flipping, to get it established—a switch on a whole board of them, nearly all the lights green now, and in the bleakest possible way it’s good to have his suspicions confirmed. Not much certainty, but maybe enough. He’s in the whiteout, staggering forward against the wind, with a wavering dark ghost of shelter ahead of him. Whatever that ends up turning out to be; rest or oblivion, it might come to the same thing in the end.

If it’s the latter, it might be better than what he deserves.

But he doesn’t understand in the way he will someday. He hasn’t had this final truth burned and beaten and cut and raped into him in the way it will be: That because there is no balancing of any universal scales, there’s nothing he can do to make any of it better, and the only question that faces him now is one that will be given to him in yet another poem read by a woman who—at the last extremity—will love him back into himself.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

But this might be the beginning of understanding.

Grunting softly, he gets to his feet, walks over to the boy. Holds out the gun grip-first. The boy gapes at him, uncomprehending, and Mike proffers the gun again.

Moving as if in a dream, the boy takes it. Mike lowers himself to his knees.

“I’m facing you now,” he murmurs. “Go on, gun’s a lot cleaner and a hell of a lot faster. I put a round in the chamber for you, all you gotta do is aim and squeeze the trigger.”

The boy is all green eyes, shock beyond shock. Mouth trembling. The gun trembling. This is cruel, what Mike is doing; he feels in every cell how fucking cruel it is, but it’s all cruel, the whole stupid brutal goddamned world, and the best that can be said for it is that sometimes the cruelty is necessary.

There is no mercy in any of it but what we can make for ourselves.

“Or you want me to do it?” The heaviness has left him, but his core is abruptly twisting up again, threatening to choke him. He was sure that much of this was right, but the disoriented fear he sees in the boy’s eyes is stabbing into him, and the world is cruel but he can’t ignore that so much of the cruelty here is him.

His hand whips out and he’s snatching the gun back from unresisting fingers. His own finger nestles against the trigger’s curve.  “Where you want the bullet to go? Mouth? Temple? Or under the chin, how about that?” Cold ring of the muzzle against his jaw, and the solid fact of it—the gun he’s holding to his own head—is so immense and so overwhelming that in the moment it’s all he can feel.

The control he had over this is sliding away from him and he watches it go, the space beneath his ribs and diaphragm a swirling chaos. He didn’t intend it, but his voice is rising, sharpening, not far from a shout. In vain he fights to moderate it, because he can’t let the others hear; if they hear, someone might come to stop this.

Tom might come to stop this.

No one can stop this.

“Tell me!” And suddenly it feels like pleading—on his knees and pleading with a child. It’s not a show; for a nightmare fraction of a second it’s the whole truth, torn out of him raw and bleeding and more honest than he’s let himself be in so, so long. “Tell me how to die!”

The boy stares at him. His hands are loose and open; Mike missed when it happened, but the knife has fallen between his boots. The boy’s green eyes are bright, shimmering, threatening to overflow. And there is something about the quality of a man’s tears which is different from a boy’s, Mike realizes, and with a sickening wrench he realizes that he’s watching the transition from one to other. The catalyst for it.

It shouldn’t be like this. It’s all wrong.

And he didn’t start it, but he’s been so much a part of how it’s all gone so wrong.

He releases the air in his lungs and sags, looks away. Lets it go. This could have gone one way or the other; now he knows. He flicks the safety on and sets the pistol aside, rocks back on his heels and bows his head. He no longer regards things like prayer with any scorn, but while Florence and her Sisters have warmed him into being largely agnostic on the subject of God, whatever God might be here is not one whom he expects—or even wants—to hear any prayers he could offer.

What he can offer is only the truth.

“Sometimes you have to kill someone,” he says quietly, and returns his gaze to the boy’s. Meets it and holds it, and doesn’t judge the tears slipping silently down the boy’s cheeks. In a way he envies the young tenderness that allows them to flow. “Sometimes they don’t give you a whole lotta choice. But whatever the reason, once you do, whether you do it yourself or you just give the order… You lose a part of yourself, way down deep, and you never, ever get it back.”

The boy is listening. That might be enough.

It might be anything.

“This world—This world is fucking brutal. It’s fucking cruel. You know that, you’ve seen it. So yeah, a day might come—hell, it’s probably gonna come sooner than later—when you have to do it. For yourself, for the people you care about. But hear me now.”

He lays a hand on the boy’s shoulder and leans in, drops his voice. This is for them and them alone.

Until it isn’t anymore. Until he sits in the setting sun with his husband and tells it in full.

“I am not worth any part of you.”

The boy is silent, head lowered now. Very slightly, his shoulders are shaking beneath Mike’s hand. But he’s strong—he’s strong enough to survive the murder of his father, strong enough to take care of his sister when he has no one else in the world, and strong enough to face the man who took his father from him and demand more than just Tuesdays. Demand what he’s worth, even if he didn’t know he was doing it.

He’s strong enough to live.

Mike gives the boy’s shoulder a gentle squeeze and lets his hand to fall to his side. He doesn’t move again, until finally the boy gets to his feet and steps past him without a word, head down, striding toward the darkness.

“Hey, kid.”

He looks over his shoulder in time to see the boy pause and turn back, face lost in shadow.

“I’m sorry,” Mike says simply. It feels close to an insult, but it comes anyway and he’s helpless to stop it. Like everything else he’s said tonight, it has the unique virtue of being true. “About your dad. About everything.” He shakes his head. The lead has seeped back in and he’s not sure how long his frame can sustain its weight. But he fears that he has a long, long road yet to walk. “I know that doesn’t make any fucking difference, but… I really am.”

Silence for a moment or two. Then the boy’s chin dips—maybe a nod, maybe only a shift in the fire-cast shadows—and he disappears into the night.

Mike watches him go. Eventually he picks up the gun and lowers himself the rest of the way to the ground, leaning back against the fallen tree and gazing blankly into the fire. Not unlike how, years later, he’ll lean against a fallen tree in the light of dying coals and weep in the arms of the man he can’t stop himself from loving, let it all bleed out of him and confess—not for any hope of absolution, but simply to not carry the weight alone.

It shouldn’t take us so long to find our way to these places. It shouldn’t take us so long to start to get better. But it takes what it takes.

And what we’re left with is all we have.

~

“So that’s what she meant.”

Mike nods. “That’s what she meant.”

It does make a difference.

Grace, who was waiting for them at the rendezvous—half permanent settlement and half encampment, and so many people rushed out of their tents and ramshackle huts when the group arrived, exclaiming and embracing and crying, and Tom stood back and watched in pleased surprise as a dark-haired woman sprinted forward and fell to her knees and pulled her son and her daughter into her arms.

Not dead. Her son was right. They found her.

Mike was nowhere to be seen. When Tom found him later that night he said nothing about it, gave no indication that he considered there to be anything to say. He kept apart and to himself until they moved on, and Tom was puzzled but let it be. He grasps now that Mike was not avoiding her out of any kind of cowardice; Mike never spoke to Grace, at least not so far as Tom saw, and the truth is that Mike wouldn’t have presumed to do so, wouldn’t have imposed his presence on anyone he hurt so much when there wasn’t an absolute need.

But Logan might have spoken to his mother. In his own time, Logan might have had his own story to tell.

It would be too simple to interpret Grace’s message to the man who killed her husband as forgiveness, Tom suspects, and also too simple to interpret it as her signaling that she’s let go of anything. It would be wonderful to believe that anything Mike has done since then has truly rebalanced the scales—and maybe once Tom would have been able to believe it, but not anymore. As Mike’s said to him more than once: it’s no use thinking in terms of what anyone does or doesn’t deserve, as if that’s a thing one can calculate and determine with certainty. Life is not a game of statistics, of weights and measures. There’s no rebalancing, and in so many cases there are no real amends that can be made, no genuine redemption attainable. Nothing that easy or trite.

But something all the same, because even the worst of us sometimes keeps on living in spite of everything, is condemned to life, and must therefore decide how to live.

“You were ready to die that night,” Tom murmurs. “Weren’t you?”

Nearly dark. They should head back soon, but just now he can’t move. The empty bottle is set down and forgotten and he’s holding Mike’s hand in his, studying the outlines of his face. Autumn moon rising through the turning leaves, huge and golden.

Very low: “I can’t remember when I haven’t been.”

“What about me?” To himself, Tom sounds almost childishly wounded by it—the thought that Mike was ready to leave him like that, without a word of explanation, without even a goodbye.

Which, of course, he eventually did.

“You’d have tried to stop him, and it had to be his choice. I hoped you’d understand.” A dry noise that isn’t quite a laugh. “I was ready the whole time, Tom. Even if it hadn’t been for that fucking prophecy… I figured there was even odds that one way or the other, I wouldn’t make it to the end with you. I was on borrowed time anyway. Best I thought I’d get is that when I died, it might be for something. Like in the final calculus… I dunno.” He releases a slow breath. “Maybe my life would tally up to more than bullshit.”

Tom swallows hard. It’s always in his head like a fragment of song he can’t shake loose, sometimes loud and sometimes nearly inaudible but ever-present.

I am nothing.

“What about now?”

Mike raises his head; flicker of his eyes. The hint of what might be a smile. Then he’s lowering it again, and Tom feels warm lips against his knuckles. Against the ring. A kiss, and then those lips are moving, and Tom hears nothing but feels the shape of the words—not what they literally are so much as the sense of them. Which was in his eyes already.

That he’s beginning to truly understand—or he’s trying, he tries every day—that a purpose isn’t the right way to think about any of this, just as it’s wrong to concern himself with what he does or doesn’t deserve. The fact is that he survived, they both did, and they found the way back to each other in the end, and that can be more than sufficient reason to wake up in the morning and live and treat every second of that life as something precious, because none of it is promised. The world is dangerous and uncertain, no matter how safe this place feels, and it could all still end tomorrow.

The world is also ugly—ugliness to which they’ve both borne witness. In which they both have, to varying degrees, participated. The beauty all around them now doesn’t change any of that. The world is scarred like the body of a tortured man, and some of those scars might never heal. The people who have suffered and lost what they love, had it ripped away from them. Who can’t forgive and owe no one any forgiveness.

There are some things in the past that neither of them might ever completely square with how things are now. Tom knows Mike well enough to know that with him, the process hasn’t concluded. Part of him must still hate himself. Part of him—please let it be smaller now, let it be shrinking—still doesn’t believe that he can really have any of what he’s built for them both.

Part of Mike still looks around at the beauty of the world and deems it a lie, sees through it to the ugliness and deems that the only truth that matters, and is still ready to die and take his leave of it. Wouldn’t mind if it happened.

But maybe another part of him wouldn’t mind if it happened for an entirely different set of reasons. Maybe that part really has found some measure of genuine peace. And maybe that part is growing.

 Later, when they’re at home and in bed and Tom is curled against him with eyes closed, slipping away into the rough-smooth hum of Mike’s voice as he reads by candlelight, it all comes together again as it has so many times, in words written by someone else that nevertheless fit everything Mike seems to want to find a way to say.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.