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Ofic -- Territoriality v.2 - part 1
That's the start of what I wrote for NaNo and while I like some parts better than the old version, some other parts really need rewritten for flow and conciseness and general clarity. (also later on I'll need a military-type person to tell me wtf i'm messing up that can't be accounted for by "hey, parallel universe with divergent history", and also a shrink though the psychiatrist doesn't show up in this part anyway.) There's more written, but I'll post it later. I still don't know if I'll keep writing this version or do a third, different start... um, whenever I figure out how it's supposed to work, that is. Damn but I'm really not used to making several drafts.
~8 000 words.
Obsolete.
He flicked the dog tags on his chest, watched stainless steel swing. The black-edged tag read "THETA COMPANY," "ANDERSEN, TYR" and his blood type, identification number, and thauma practitioner status -- level two (barely registering as having any charge worth shaping,) non-practicing. The red-edged one, the medical, read "CLASSIFIED LVL.4," "AUTHORIZED MEDICAL PERSONNEL ONLY," "DO NOT RESUSCITATE."
Tended to end badly for the well-meaning guys attempting the resuscitating.
Not that he had ever needed it. As far as he remembered.
He nudged the tags again. Swing, swing, trailing arcs of reflected fluorescent light. He was going to need to have them changed, added to; two slashes at the end, and then a star, a staff-and-serpent symbol. Honorable Discharge, medical grounds. Not how he'd planned to leave the military.
Then again you weren't supposed to leave Theta Company otherwise than in a body bag. It was in his contract somewhere. Felt weird to be cut loose, body and brain both still filled with classified stuff.
He supposed with the war over and the demilitarization orders trickling through the ranks he counted as one more weapon to decommission. Made sense...
Except, no, it really didn't. What the hell were the brass thinking?
"Andersen, hey. Nice bling."
Tyr looked up at the man ambling down the corridor, already half out of uniform, dress jacket slung over his shoulder and only a grayish, shapeless old tanktop underneath. The effect was weird over the white riding pants and polished, knee-high black boots that comprised the rest of the dress uniform. He couldn't help a glance at his own chest, though, the unfamiliar pressure of the high collar against his throat a brief distraction, and the small row of silvery crosses that said, in order, "you did a good job," "until you got caught, alive," "but at least you escaped."
(It bothered him, that last one. He didn't remember the escape at all.)
(Maybe the Gwel had tried to resuscitate him. Teach them to read tags.)
"You got medals of your own," he said, voice quiet, a little raspy from being so silent for so long. Keller shrugged and gave his jacket a little shake, making the POW medal clink against his buttons.
"Yeah, I got a new one for that clusterfuck, and then I got a 'take that general discharge, Keller, or you're getting a dishonorable one, and I'll kick you in the knee too!'"
Tyr knew better than to encourage the man. He couldn't help but smile nevertheless, the corner of his lips tilting up against his best judgment. Keller's own heavy-lidded, mocking smile stretched out, lazy and satisfied.
"Waiting on Reynolds?"
"Mmh."
"Huh." A distant, thoughtful look flashed through Keller's eyes and then was swallowed by casual disinterest, like he'd been a bit surprised at first, and now wasn't. Tyr tilted his head a bit.
"You too, I take it?" he asked, for confirmation, and wasn't surprised at the shrug and the nod he got in response. Made sense, really. He and Keller had never really worked together long-term before, just met here and there, just like everyone else in Theta Company -- the brass didn't like it much when the experimental black ops soldiers bonded together enough to forget to be suicidal, which he'd been told happened...
(He missed Serrano. He didn't even know her that well either. He just... missed her. They hunted well together.)
... He and Keller had never really worked together long-term, until Tyr woke up one day to the door of his cell being kicked open and a dirty-blond man with a very non-regulation ponytail was shoved in, eyes wild and teeth bared. They'd been debriefed down to the bones already, several times in a row, but if yet another higher-up wanted to see them together, made sense it'd be related to that. Again.
Keller plopped down on the plastic chair beside him, making it creak under his weight. All muscle, of course, and he wasn't exactly a small man, broad-shouldered, arms thick; he made Tyr look even scrawnier by contrast, with his wiry muscles and long runner's legs.
Keller pulled a length of string from his pocket and started weaving a cat's cradle between his fingers, humming something annoyingly tuneless under his breath. Tyr watched; it was more interesting than watching his own tags swing, if not by very much. If he remembered right, Keller was a Thauma 3, not that much higher than he was. "Does it work?"
A shrug. "It's probability shifting. Who knows? Only way to measure would be to use it in a casino; solid numbers, easy to graph, and then I'd get banned up and down the coast."
"What are you shifting it toward?"
"General Mardsten getting gonorrhea."
"... Ah."
Another shrug; Keller flipped his hands face up and did something to the string with his little fingers that changed the whole pattern somehow. "His place is prolly plastered with anti-T, but whatever. Something to do, right?"
"You might consider taking up Solitaire."
At the bland comment Keller looked up at him and laughed, fingers twisting and tangling the strings blind.
He didn't lose his tangle even when the door they waited by opened and a secretary waved them in.
"Andersen, Keller. Come in."
The room they were ushered in wasn't overly large, but it had a high ceiling, a high window. Colonel Reynolds sat at her desk with her back to the glass, as if daring someone outside to take a potshot. At first Tyr only saw jet black hair, gathered in a low ponytail at her nape, as she bowed her head over a last quick note, and then she looked up and it was all arctic eyes -- wrinkles at the corners, barely noticeable; not so much because they were all that shallow as because the irises were too pale a blue and seemed to see right through an uncomfortable number of layers of cloth and flesh, possibly down to the bone, and it was hard to take much notice of the rest of her face past that.
Tyr came to a very regulation stop two steps before the polished desk. "Lieutenant Andersen, reporting as ordered," he said, snapping a salute, and staring conscientiously at the window frame a little to the left and over her head. Regulations didn't have it written in black on white that staring contests with a superior officer weren't done, but he'd always figured that was strongly implied.
Keller ambled in after him, still playing with his string even though he couldn't have been able to concentrate properly to complete the effect and the charge had to have been spilled and lost, a smile on his face challenging Reynolds to take issue with it.
Reynolds merely gave a pleasant smile, the faint expression made impossible to miss by the glistening coat of venous-red lipstick on her mouth. "I take it you've already completed and returned your severance paperwork, Lieutenant Keller."
Keller grinned back, the string undone now, twirled around a thumb, his whole body screaming 'hah! Not military anymore' with every inch of his loose stance, one hip cocked. "Yep."
"Oh, that's too bad." Another pleasant smile. Tyr winced, just barely. "I'm afraid there's been a little incident in the secretarial pool this morning. But I'm sure your paperwork has only been misled temporarily. Likely by next week it should all be fixed."
Keller's eyes narrowed; after a second of staring he gave a disgruntled huff and relaxed into the standard 'at ease' position, hands behind his back. Tyr could have told him he might as well spare himself the trouble.
"Andersen. I don't suppose you had the same regrettable incident with your own paperwork."
"... No ma'am. Haven't finished filling it."
"Good. Don't."
He stopped breathing, for a second. Out of sight his hand clenched on his wrist.
"...I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I didn't mean I could have you reinstated."
Her gaze was still cool, but her voice had softened with distant compassion. He gritted his teeth, fought to keep the rest of his face impassive, not to show her the disappointment. "Yes, ma'am."
He hadn't even really been happy in Theta company. He'd been useful, though; he'd had a purpose. He'd been in the army ever since he turned sixteen, for god's sake, what was he supposed to do now?
"Lieutenant, even putting aside your current health issues, you were a prisoner of war. We could not have put you back in the field--"
"Now that's bullshit," Keller interrupted. "The other branches maybe but Theta Company doesn't work like that."
Reynolds favored him with an unimpressed glance. "It does when there's significant mental trauma."
Keller turned to look at Tyr, eyes bright with disturbingly casual interest. "Got any mental trauma?"
"I have no idea. I can't remember most of what happened over there." Tyr narrowed his eyes, annoyed by the display, wanting to annoy back. "You neither. Right?"
"Oh, yeah, sure. Total amnesia."
For a brief, very brief moment, Tyr watched the man before him and saw not a battlefield comrade or a fellow human being but a lot of noisy, bothersome meat. Potentially dangerous meat, but even predators were food, once they were dead.
There were a lot of teeth in that grinning mouth. Challenge. He'd have to be faster.
"... I'm sorry, ma'am. You were saying?"
She couldn't know what had just gone through his head; his expression hadn't changed one iota. It hadn't even lasted that long. The way she tilted her head, though... and then she waved it off.
"I will be frank." A quick shrug. "You'd have heard it on the grapevine soon enough anyway. Part of our peace treaty with the Gwel rests on us getting rid of any therianthropes in our ranks. Of course both sides know that's not going to happen, not when you've proven so effective, but if we want the peace to stick we have to at least pretend we will. Hence a lot of your most damaged colleagues, who would otherwise have been allowed to go back to," he liked that she didn't sugar-coat it like most people outside of Theta company did, "suicide missions, are going to need to be shuffled out of the military on disability."
Tyr took it in with a suitably thoughtful pause. "Permission to speak freely?"
"Granted."
"It makes no sense."
She smiled at him; he felt like an unexpectedly clever child being patted on the head. His eyes narrowed; he stared back, even knowing he shouldn't.
"It doesn't. We're being released into the civilian population, as is? We're dangerous." He forced his eyes closed. He still felt Keller's presence beside him like a buzz on his skin, an irritant; not comfortable enough to be an ally, therefore potential threat. He still felt the unvoiced challenge in her stare, the challenge that he had to concede even though she hadn't proven herself to him yet. The next admission was hard to push out of his throat. "We're only going to get worse."
The therianthrope experiment had never been meant to be stable long-term. It couldn't be; the suppressants alone were hell on the kidneys, for one.
And then there were the... other issues, the ones the suppressants were meant to keep down.
The ones that made them such a double-edged weapon.
"The doctors all say so, yes." Her next words were carefully measured, tracking the two of them so she wouldn't lose the smallest flicker of expression. "It'll get worse before it gets better."
Even knowing she was dissecting him in her head didn't stop Tyr from twitching, from staring right back at her again. "Better? Do you know what you're saying, ma'am?"
"The likelihood of survival is low, yes. The likelihood of sanity is lower." She turned her hand face up, red-tipped nails fanning open, like letting something inconsequential fly away. "Would you rather give up and die now? I know you have a gun. The morgue is one floor down."
His next reaction was inexcusable -- uncharacteristic, too, nothing like him, but he couldn't stop it, couldn't keep his upper lip from curling back and a snarl from rattling out from some place deep in his chest. Beside him Keller had gone all hunting-still and watchful, waiting. Tyr clawed his way back to his usual calm, yanked it back to himself, tried to untwist his face, bank the ... whatever it was that shone through his eyes and wasn't him, wasn't.
If he hadn't been on his way out already, he thought with a distant sinking feeling, this would probably do it.
"Very good," she said, low and quiet, and a little throaty with pure satisfaction.
"--Ma'am?"
"I wanted to be sure. We do tend to select you Theta people based on a certain willingness to die..."
"For our country. For the survival of our species. Not for -- just because."
Keller snorted quietly. He didn't interrupt, though, head tilted like this was all very fascinating and not any of his business.
"Some do anyway. But you fought your way back to camp. You survived. I'm glad to see it wasn't an accident."
He gritted his teeth, for a second, and then he told himself to stop being so raw and think. She was sounding him -- them -- out for something. He was ... still needed. Still technically a part of the military -- stuck in administrative limbo, still, and that wasn't going to last, but not completely severed yet.
She was selling them something. Did he want to buy?
"In any case, Lieutenant Keller might have been right before the peace treaty was signed. We accounted for a high rate of attrition, but now the war is over... we have all those good soldiers who risked life and limb and sanity to gain us an edge, and we have nowhere to put them, and no more missions for them to go out in a blaze of glory." Her voice went quieter. "There's only so many spots with the Border Patrol, and Theta Company is not suited to security detail for politicians, is it? Even now, being in the city is costing you."
The city was less of a problem than the press of people in it. He was sure it never used to be so bad before his stint as a POW and subsequent medication withdrawal. Alright, he hadn't really used his leave for the last three years -- staying on base between missions was no problem -- but he would have remembered that, wouldn't he? He didn't want Reynolds to be right.
Keller finally got bored. He shifted his weight to one foot, arms crossed on his chest. "How about you cut to the chase?"
Bland, nice-weather-we're-having voice. "Your miraculous return was a little more public than people would have preferred, so you couldn't be disappeared."
... there, now this he could get. Even his blood work was classified, and now that his suppressants were failing he was a threat to public safety, and he understood he couldn't be relied upon to do his job anymore, had to be let go, and in their Company that meant death. He didn't want that to happen, but he would have understood why.
Looked like the right hand still didn't know what the left hand was doing, and now the left hand was left juggling dropped pieces before they hit the ground.
"The fallback plan is to wait until the first public disturbance report and have you brought back in to the high security hospital wing. You wouldn't be getting back out. That'd be poor repayment, though..."
"Pff, my left butt cheek."
Reynolds allowed herself a smile at Keller's comment. "... That, and you may still have an use."
"Aha, that's more like it. So are you going to cut to the chase or are there some more insinuations and 'look how benevolent we are' bullshit to stuff in first?"
"We're assembling a group of people in similar situations to yours. Accidental suppressant withdrawal, medical contraindication, rejection..." A flip of her open hand. "There's a chance you might survive. There's even a chance you might come out on the other side sane. There's a chance you might lose it and have to be put down. We need to know how and why it happens, what we need for a successful integration. I need you to volunteer to spend the rest of your withdrawal period there. There'll be..." The hesitation that followed there was the first real one he'd heard. "...people who can deal with the results. Whatever those results be."
People who could deal? As in... what, snipers? Tyr breathed out. Probably doctors, specialists. Maybe some other Theta Company guys whose meds were still working perfectly well, for security.
"And then we walk out and all is sunshine and butterflies."
Reynolds' next look was tired. Not at the end of her patience yet, but her face said it was coming up. "Keller, you're a pain in the ass, but that isn't a hanging offence yet. We have no interest in wasting our time figuring out how to rehabilitate you, only to lock you up anyway and throw away the key. What would be the point?"
"Classified stuff?"
"You've signed confidentiality agreements. Respect them. No problem." A little sigh, eyes narrowed as she looked them over. "So. Yes, no?"
"Where?"
"A ranch, a half-hour out of town. It's a big place. You won't have to share rooms, and there's no neighbors. We just ask that you follow the recommendations of our advisors."
Keller made a scoffing noise. "Nice big isolated space... Got coordinates? I was thinking of buying a bike, maybe I'll feel like going that way sometime next week..."
"I was planning to put you on a jeep with the supplies delivery. Corporal Lugvaner will hitch a ride back with Doctor Abram tomorrow and you can keep it for transport. We're not planning to stop you from going into town entirely; just discuss it with the advisors first."
"Today?" Tyr asked.
"Did you have anything else planned?"
He'd mostly planned to get himself a hotel room and spend the night staring at his service handgun, the one he'd been gifted as a thank-you-bye. Oh well. Being a test subject (again) wasn't exactly a long hoped-for career move, but better than being let out into the street and then conveniently hit by a truck no one would ever identify. "...Nothing I can't put off."
"Good. That's settled. Of course all your living expenses will be covered during that time... Lieutenant Keller?"
Keller eyed her. Eyed Tyr. Tyr watched him back from the corner of his eye. He ... didn't know the other man well -- only knew he redefined 'attitude problem', and Tyr really shouldn't find him amusing as often as he did, and (Tyr had bled on him) (they'd bled on each other) they'd survived the same thing together. (Even if he could only remember the first couple of days with anything approaching clarity, and after that nothing but flashes and feelings and impressions.)
It should be a bonding experience, he'd been told, something to forge lifelong friendships on, only it felt weird, Keller having seen too many things and Tyr not knowing what he'd shown, how far down he had bared himself, and besides they'd been separated the second they got into camp.
He would ... appreciate having a not-unfamiliar face, wherever they were going. But it wasn't his place to ask. He had nothing to presume on, and he wasn't going to do Reynolds' job for her, either.
"Hrrm. Oh well. Might as well see it. I reserve the right to up and leave whenever I damn well feel like it."
"You do?" Reynolds replied, a dark eyebrow arched in cultured mockery.
Keller's smile back was wide and pleasant and utterly fake. "And while we're at it, drop the bullshit with the secretarial pool and my release papers, because annoying as it is, it's not going to hold me."
Staring contest.
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."
And now it was a Mexican stand-off, only there was a faint little smile at the corner of her mouth that said even with a ticked off therianthrope who outweighed her by half again her own body weight, Colonel Reynolds was still amused.
"You'll get confirmation by letter sometime this week." A silky, blood-colored smile. "We do, after all, know where to find you."
She shifted in her chair, opened a drawer, her attention already moving away from the two of them. "You'll find Corporal Lugvaner waiting in the courtyard by the west exit. I trust you can find your way. Dismissed."
Tyr snapped a salute, mostly by reflex, before turning on his heels and walking to the door; Keller crossed his arms again, glowered at her dark head a last time, and followed.
The fluorescent lights and strange plasticky smells were still bothersome, but this time Tyr wasn't fighting not to think. There'd be a lot to think about, once he got to the ranch, but he had made his decision, and now all was left was to wait for further data.
He had a purpose again. For how long, he didn't know, but that was fine. He could wait.
At his side Keller pulled out his string again and started fiddling away, though by the face he was making and the knots he ended up with, it was obvious he was still too nettled for it to go well.
"Goddamn. There's nothing to shift with that woman that I can get at."
Tyr snorted quietly. "You do know that even if it doesn't work, cursing people is a misdemeanor?"
"So's burning police cars." A shrug; Keller tugged his fingers free and let the string fall back into his palm. And then he turned to Tyr and gifted him with another of those 'trust me, I'm not a shark' grins that seemed to unveil about a hundred teeth. "So. You seem interested. Want me to teach you string theory?"
Tyr blinked, stared at him, an eyebrow going up against his best judgment. "... Don't even pretend you don't know that's not what string theory is."
"Come on, you know you want to." He waggled bushy dark blond eyebrows. "I'll show you how to Jacob someone off their ladder."
Oh, goddamnit. Tyr didn't want to like Keller. He was unpredictable and deliberately contrary and an irritant, and-- "Bloodthirsty, and a dork."
Keller clutched at his chest. "Ow, straight through my heart."
"Your heart's on the other side," Tyr informed him placidly. Keller obligingly shifted his clutching hand from the right side of his chest to the left.
He didn't want to find Keller likeable. He did anyway. Okay. That was fine.
Likeable didn't have to mean trustworthy.
+
With traffic in the way 'a half hour' ended up closer to forty-five minutes; the base wasn't in the middle of the city, but they had to go around for a little bit. After that the road arrowed away through fields and woods... and then fields... and some more fields. Surprisingly, Keller didn't chat away the whole time, with either Tyr or the driver, or fidget with his string or the buttons and straps and cushion seats.
Tyr suspected it was because he was having enough fun as it was in the backseat, sitting at the very edge of Lugvaner's field of vision and staring holes through the side of his head, every inch of him still as only a predator waiting for that perfect moment to pounce could be.
A small part of Tyr saw the increasingly restless glances the poor Corporal kept throwing back -- reminiscent of a deer knowing better than to leave cover and run, but on the edge of losing to fear and doing it anyway -- and was almost tempted to join in.
"Uh -- look, there we are! Ten more minutes."
He turned on a little side road, surrounded with high wire fences; a short moment later they were driving under a rustic-looking wooden gate decorated with horseshoes. And some more fences.
The previous owners must have been raising champion jumping horses, because the fences were pretty high. Higher than two horses standing on top of each other, even. Necks included.
The owners must also have sold very recently, because, while the posts were weathered, the wire on it showed not a touch of rust anywhere; it was also more densely packed than any type of cattle would have needed.
There was a dead crow on the side of the road. High voltage, huh.
"We spent the whole war infiltrating high-security bases and destroying them," he mused, low and slow, head tilted back so he could talk to Keller without having to look away from the rows and rows of shiny, brand-new electric fence. "Going around sabotaging anything we could get our hands on." He shook his head, mildly disgusted. "A wire fence? Really?"
Keller started grinning a grin like knives, if knives also had teeth. "Hey. First five ways you can think of to get past it with just the contents of your pockets."
It was a silly game and Corporal Lugvaner's eyes were getting a bit too round, and it might not be a great idea to make the guy doubt their sanity any more than...
... ah, who was he kidding, everyone in the other branches already thought Theta guys could flip and kill you seven times before you hit the ground. And then go to buy dinner with the contents of your pockets, went the joke, and no therianthrope had ever done anything but smile thinly, lips pressed together, and not mention that there was no need to bother, that you could be dinner.
"... Can I pick up stuff from the ground?"
"Hm. Seven ways, then."
Tyr pointed at a dead tree they were going past, a little way away from the fence. "Climb, swing from that branch, jump over. Dig underneath." No shovel, but he'd done it with his hands before. (His hands had come away bloody, nails cracked, but once you fell into the rhythm it came so, so easily.) "Kick a post until it breaks. Throw my jacket over the top wire and jump over." He paused, thought about it for another second. "Destroy the power generator."
Keller was laughing to himself in the backseat. "Well, if you wanna be unsubtle about it."
"Uh. It's -- it's for the coyotes. The fence, I mean. Sir."
Tyr and Keller snorted together. Stay in one place for a whole month? There wouldn't be a coyote for miles around the ranch in under a week.
"Yeah, s'why the generator is on the other side of the fence from where we'll be." Huh. It was. The fence retreated, a little farther ahead; there was a shack, where the wires went. "Guess you can throw your stuff off the ground at it, Andersen."
Tyr was still counting under his breath. "Use rocks to crush wires... Use the water trough to short circuit it... Use the trough as a stepladder, use a stick to hold wires apart wide enough to slip through, take a running start and kick off a fence post and jump over..."
Coyotes. Motherfucking coyotes.
Mulvaner'd probably been ordered to make a report on them.
"... get pissed off and plow right through..."
Keller leaned forward between the two front seats and peered at him. "You forgot 'pick the fence lock.'"
"I don't have lockpicks." He tilted his head, considering, and then touched the butt of the gun under his arm. "I do have bullets."
"If you grit your teeth any harder you'll break something."
--Goddamnit.
"Also you'll start making those really annoying screakchy noises."
"Shut up, Keller."
"Uh huh. Hey, Lug. Pull over."
There was a second where the guy's -- the kid's, really -- eyes went all the way ringed with white and panic flowed from him, sharp and strong, and Tyr went tense all over in his seat.
"No, I can't -- we're -- we're almost here anyway, sir, you--"
"Do it." Lugvaner was parked in the next five seconds. Tyr stayed in his seat, breathing slowly in and out. He could smell grass and warm asphalt and heated tires. It was ... not nice, but it wasn't acrid (mouth-watering) like fear.
"Okay, out. We're continuing on foot."
"Don't order me around," Tyr said in a very calm, controlled voice, staring right ahead through the windshield.
"Goddamnit, Andersen, if I have to drag you out--"
The noise that came from his throat then wasn't anything a human body ought to be able to produce. He sat, muscles stiff all over, fingertips creasing the door handle, struggling with himself to keep from turning back and face Keller because if he did he knew they'd fight; he would start it.
"You're scaring the kid," Keller said quietly. Tyr flinched.
He could see hands clenched on the wheel, knuckles bloodless. He undid the seatbelt and picked up the backpack between his feet, and was out of the jeep in two seconds. He started walking, ignoring the "Sir!" behind him.
Keller didn't follow, not for a minute or two, and after that he left Tyr his space. A short moment after that the Jeep started again, though it kept going at a crawl so as not to close the distance.
Tyr was being ridiculous. What the hell was this about, anyway? What was the matter with that stupid, pointless fence? Maybe the people who'd set it up were just afraid a nice and sweet family taking a walk one weekend would cross through at the wrong time. Like when one of the therianthropes was out having a good nice sulk.
He'd be such a liability on the field, being so... touchy, moody, something like that.
(He wanted to hurt something, to fight, to tear into something -- someone, same thing, didn't matter -- he wanted to run and run and never stop, he wanted to get away from here. Get out of the low, dug-in path, walled in by high embankments and higher metal nets, making the fine dusting of dark hair on his arms prickle up from the electric charge in them.)
"... Tyr?"
He didn't respond, but the way his shoulders drew in was proof enough he'd heard. Keller drew a little closer, but stayed several steps behind him, on the other side of the road.
"Claustrophobia, huh?" Keller said, and while yes, it might have been partly that, what it was was an excuse.
Going with it wouldn't be a true lie of omission, he knew Keller didn't believe himself either, but it would feel like one anyway. Saving face by lying to each other and pretending they believed it.
"I'm slipping."
A long moment of silence. Good. Keller wasn't dismissing it like it was another joke. He'd have to hurt him if he was.
"Not the farthest you've ever slipped," he said, and Tyr stopped on the spot and turned to stare at him, stomach clenching. Keller looked back, hands in his pockets -- see, no threat -- face serious as it rarely was. "It's not like it's a one-way street. Might be harder the other way, I'm not saying, but it's not impossible either."
"I -- slipped farther before. Huh." He couldn't imagine that. He didn't want to imagine that. He was still himself now, just spiraling closer and closer to that huge black hole at the center, so little in the way of brakes to control himself. He didn't know what would be there, when he went over the edge. What would be there waiting in the dark.
"Oh man, yeah, you have no idea, this is really nothing in comparison."
Tyr stared, incredulous. "Of course I have no idea, you won't fucking tell me what happened."
"Yep. And I still won't." He grinned suddenly. "Doesn't seem to be necessary anyway. See? Now you want to plant a fist in my face instead of eating it. All better!"
"I could do both," Tyr growled, but he was already deflating, because the asshole was right. He sighed, glanced at the jeep -- was Lugvaner even older than eighteen? He didn't look it -- and turned away to resume trudging his way to the supposed ranch they were apparently so close to, not that he could see much but fences and the top of high swinging grass and the sky from down there. He felt corralled, funneled like cattle, he -- "Talk to me."
"Sure. About?"
"Anything you want." A blink. "Where did you learn my first name?" There was only a T. Andersen on his tags. Keller even pronounced it almost-right, Teer instead of Tire or Tear. (No one anywhere in the whole of the Vinland continent, north or south, seemed to be able to figure out quite the right nuance with the vowel, which was a bit frustrating and a lot confusing considering the history of the settlement of the continent, but he'd gotten used to that. Just a matter of accents.)
"How else? You told me."
... Damn it. He looked away, embarrassed. He hated having to ask, to admit exactly how much he'd lost. "What else did I...?"
"Not much. I remembered because calling you Andersen didn't get your attention."
Calling him Tyr did. Get his attention back from what? How far down had he gone? How much of himself had he lost? He breathed in deep, trying to banish the thought from his head. He had himself back now. Hadn't lost anything. (Except his control. Except his stability. He'd slipped before. It would keep happening, more and more often, until...) "Well, if you know mine..."
"Oh no no no, that's so not a fair trade. I mean your name's weird, okay, but not that weird."
Tyr stared at him wordlessly. Keller stared back, mulish.
"Oh well. I'm sure Reynolds must know."
"Urgh. You'd ask her? Traitor." A huff, not even half serious. "Fine, fine. It's Dian. Don't call me that."
"Like Diana? Moon goddess?"
"Goddess of the hunt, thanks." A huff, raking his hand through shoulder blade-length hair, so far past regulation it wasn't funny. Tyr's own overgrown, bristly crew cut really didn't seem bad in comparison.
"Were you supposed to be a girl?" he asked, eyeing the thick biceps and the scruffy three-days beard doubtfully. Was that all in knee-jerk reaction? Hm.
"Oh, look, the ranch. Whee."
Heh. "Subtle."
"Fuck you very much."
After a short incline there was another gate, decorated with prosperity sigils and some more horseshoes, and then a sprawling, two-story building that seemed to be comprised mostly of refurbished granges strung together and grafted onto an old stone-walled house.
An older woman in a white doctor's blouse was walking back and forth on the gravel path before the white-painted porch, checking her watch every three steps. Her head jerked up when she saw them coming, and for a moment it seemed as if she would come stalking up to them, but she reined herself in, waiting for them at the bottom of the wooden steps.
"Welcome. I'm Doctor Abram. I'll be in charge of your medical care." She held out a dark hand with short-clipped, iridescent nails to shake, though her eyes were watchful, possibly wary. She wasn't letting herself be afraid, though, shoulders pulled back and head held high, so Tyr nodded back and took it, shook.
"Lieutenant Andersen. This is Lieutenant Keller."
"You're late. Did anything happen?" Her eyes glanced at the road, relaxed minutely when the Jeep crept out through the gate and went to park on the gravel. Lugvaner's hands were set very properly onto the wheel and he steered like it required all his attention.
"Traffic first, and then we just felt like walking the rest of the way," Keller said with a pleasant smile that almost reached his eyes, and made a 'no matter' hand gesture, like throwing away something unimportant over his shoulder.
"I see. Well, gentlemen, if you'll follow me, I'll show you around." She led the way up the porch steps; they trailed after her. Lugvaner was busying himself with a couple of crates taken from the back of the jeep and a side door by where he'd parked. "You'll have the rest of the day to settle in and meet the other patients. Tomorrow we'll have a group discussion -- we want everyone to be clear on the goals we mean to accomplish here and the means we have to accomplish it, so yes, that does mean it's mandatory, Lieutenant Keller."
Tyr blinked a bit, glanced back. Keller was making a face. "I'm not technically in the army anymore."
"If you're not going to play the game, you might as well leave now," Tyr said, and shrugged. "It won't be of any use to you." He wondered how far the brass would let Keller get, though. Then again they knew how to drop off the radar. Maybe that'd buy him some time.
"It'll get me free food. Anyway. You were saying?"
Abrams didn't comment, just kept going with the spiel; meals were at these times, kitchen was not usually off-limits but the cook's fridge was, please use the other fridge in case you needed snacks and here was the list to request what to get it refilled with (huh, unusually generous there), a lounge room and TV through here, reunion room there, doctor's office, psychiatrist's office, and through the communicating room they now were in, one of the grange extensions. It had been divided into rooms -- fairly recently if Tyr believed the smells of cement, fresh paint and plaster tickling his nose. A staircase at the end of the corridor went up to the second story, under the roof.
"Lots of rooms."
"They won't all be occupied for a good long while. We're starting with a small group. You are free to choose the room you want, provided it isn't already in use. There are only three other people here at this time, though; you have a lot left to choose from."
Keller went straight for the staircase. Tyr took his time and looked through one of the open doors, and the next. They all seemed kind of similar to him; a bit small, though bigger than the dorms; a bed, a desk under the window, (no bars on the window,) a dresser, but the rooms on the left side of the corridor seemed to contain single beds and the ones on the right bunks. "I thought we didn't have to share?"
The doctor looked mildly uncomfortable for a moment. "You don't have to, but some might prefer it."
"... You're going to let us partner up? Long term?"
He couldn't describe what the feeling that shot through him right there was. Theta Company didn't like its members to get too close to each other, kept breaking up buddies, shuffling them with different people. They never really had time to get to know each other more than surface-deep, get too attached. The official reason was that you might have to work with a stranger at some point and not know how to deal, and it was better to know a variety of people. There were only so many of them out there, though, and some skills were just complementary, so on and off people would meet again.
Tyr didn't mind working like that, he never had; ever since childhood he'd been a solitary boy, fine on his own so long as he had a book, could go bird-watching or biking around or... whatever, it was all fine.
"Those who wish it, yes. It, ah, it has been pointed out recently that it might actually be a stabilizing factor. In that case."
"Huh."
"For those still serving, the disadvantages outweigh this, and besides the medication is supposed to keep that suppressed anyway, but for retired therianthropes... I'm afraid I'm not well-versed enough in psychological effects to discuss this, but our specialist will be there tomorrow."
Tyr drifted back to the right side of the corridor, the bunk beds. Briefly he considered asking Keller if he wanted to share, but if he had to live with the man he'd probably strangle him in his sleep. Besides Keller still felt... dangerous, unknown. There would be very little sleep to be had.
Upstairs a chair or some other piece of furniture was dragged against a wooden floor; light footsteps made their way to the staircase and down. Not Keller's, Keller didn't make any noise when he moved.
He'd only seen combat boots and camo pants when he stiffened, nostrils wide, aware that the doctor was watching him and unable to care, to mind, because he knew it, he knew her.
She'd dropped weight since the last time they met, hollowing out her cheeks a bit too much, lengthening a face that didn't really need any more length added to it. Underneath corkscrew bangs a white bandage covered her right eye, contrasting with usually bronzed, now unhealthy sallow skin; pink, raised scars, still new, crawled their way up her forehead a bit, cut across the yellow bruise on her cheek to curl around the edge of her jaw.
She came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs and watched him, and he watched her back. Hands in her pockets, spine loose, hazel-green eye heavy-lidded, almost uncaring, and then she quirked him a barely-there smile.
She was here, with the disabled, rejected ones. She wasn't out in the field, or in the infirmary waiting for the accelerated healing factor to kick in.
Which meant the eye was gone. You could only heal what was still there.
"He dead?" he asked, almost casual.
He hadn't expected Serrano to laugh -- chuckle, really, but still. He was relaxing somehow before she even said, "He is."
"Figured." Well then. It was probably better than losing a leg. "Want to bunk together?"
"Sure."
Behind her Keller leaned out of the staircase and leered. "What is this? Coed bedroom? Is that even allowed?"
Oh. Right. Tyr looked over his shoulder at Doctor Abram, who was still observing from behind, with a strange expression he couldn't read. "Doctor?"
"... It's fine, it's fine. What you do on your own time is your own business. Just make sure to visit the infirmary for proper supplies if--"
"We're not having sex," Serrano interrupted, voice bland, though there was faint amusement in the quirk of her lips. She looked back at Tyr, tilted her head in invitation. "Which room do you want?"
Tyr shrugged, pointed at the door just beside her. Under the staircase would be fine; he'd hear people coming and going better.
"Alright. I'll get my bag."
Tyr nodded and turned his head to track her down the corridor until she disappeared in some other bedroom, and then pushed the chosen door open. He threw his backpack on the top bunk, turned around to find Keller with his shoulder propped up on the doorjamb, eyebrows up and looking much too entertained.
"What do you want?"
"Introductions? That'd be nice. I don't think we've ever been assigned together." Keller looked from him to her, who was coming back, taking her in from head to boots and then back up.
"Serrano, scouting. Keller, demolitions."
"Hey there." Keller's smile quirked weird, eyes gone heavy-lidded. Sarcastic? Something like that. "You guys know each other long?"
"Boot camp, I guess."
"Aha. Barely enrolled, your sweet sixteen..."
Tyr had indeed enrolled at eight AM sharp on the first day he was legally able to, but that was a weird way to say that. There was nothing sweet about being a teenage Private, especially one suicidal and susceptible to propaganda enough to say yes to a Black Ops program, and approached deliberately because they had no family to get too curious on their behalf.
"Serrano's a year older." Tyr shrugged. "We're at opposite ends of the alphabet though." Keller blinked a bit, like something Tyr had said had confused him, so he explained a bit more. "...I mean that even after we went into Theta Company we didn't get assigned together much. No reason to talk."
Serrano's lips were twitching. "Mnh. Guess we should count our anniversary from that first field mission, then," she said, tone excessively bland. Keller made an annoyed face.
"... Alright, what did I miss?"
"Nothing," they said as one. Tyr frowned. No confession followed, so in the end he just sighed and dropped it.
"Where are the last two?"
Serrano shrugged. "Tarek, kitchen. Sullivan, bedroom, closed door." So the first one would be busy, and the second one wouldn't want to be disturbed. Oh well, he'd meet them at dinner.
The room would be fine to sleep in, but standing there with the window closed and Keller still lounging in the doorway made him a little twitchy.
"Going on recon," he decided. He didn't like not knowing how much terrain he had to work with. "Coming?"
Keller studied him for a couple of seconds and then shook his head no. "Gonna take a nap upstairs, I think. You kids have fun... not too much fun, though." He turned around to leave, waving goodbye over his shoulder.
Tyr turned to his roommate, who was sitting on her bunk, tightening her bootlaces.
"What was that about?"
"He's not sure he believes us about not having sex."
Tyr gave her a baffled look. "... Why would we lie about that? We're not in each other's chain of command. It's not against regulations."
She grinned at him with white teeth, raised scars bunching up so it went asymmetrical. Tyr wasn't really sure what he'd done to deserve it.
The corridor was empty, Doctor Abram gone at some point, Keller upstairs, no watchdog in sight.
Surely they'd have security in place. At least to protect the doctors and the cook, just in case. The people in charge wouldn't be that crazy.
Tyr stepped back in the room and closed the door. Serrano arched her eyebrow at him; he nodded to the window, went there in silence. The frame stuck a bit, but when he yanked, the windowpane shifted up. A quick glance outside... The slope wasn't bad, they weren't even a full body length away from the ground. Ridiculously easy. He glanced back, even as he sat on the desk and swung his legs around over the ledge, his head tilted in question.
She huffed out a breath that would have been a laugh with a little more noise in it and pulled herself to her feet. He jumped; the gravel was noisy under his feet, couldn't be helped, but he thought that might be a good thing. He'd want advance warning if anyone came that close to his window.
He could already breathe easier.
Crunch; she landed beside him. Fields on their left, more fence, hollows and slopes and mounds, solitary trees. In front, posts marking separate horse enclosures, barely chest-high. On their right, some distance away, a wood; no way to tell how deep, where the fence was. "Where to first?"
For the first time today he caught her hesitating.
"Haven't gone on preliminary recon yet?" he asked, a little surprised.
A few seconds went by, silent.
"The ground isn't as flat as it looks," she admitted, voice carefully sterilized of any emotional content.
... Huh.
When he looked at her she was gazing at the horizon, head turned away from him so the bandaged side of her face wouldn't be visible.
"I'll go first. If I trip, go around."
He could have told her they could take it easy, it wasn't real recon and there were no gwel waiting in the bushes, maybe deer at the very most. He could have told her they could walk. But no, they couldn't.
For one thing she might have kicked him. Or worse, chosen not to come.
He started at a jog; she was on his heels the next second, and then they were on grass and passing the first wooden fence, going through the first paddock, where no human had walked there in weeks or longer to leave paths. The overgrown grass was damp with recent rain, slowly soaking through his pants and trying to wrap around his ankles and trip him; and it made sense to lengthen his stride, to fall into that old ground-eating clip, so he could just tear through.
She ran with him; they fanned out, bodies low to the ground, all their senses scanning ahead with relentless intensity, hunting the wind -- things that weren't there. He heard her trip sometimes, fall out of synch, go the long way around obstacles she could have cleared at a jump, and it threw him, made him tense for a second or two each time, but they'd learned to hunt together once before; they could do it again.
There were bumps and hollows and bushes on the ranch's grounds, little pockets of solemn, silent woods, and sometimes it was almost as if the electric fence wasn't there at all.
~8 000 words.
Obsolete.
He flicked the dog tags on his chest, watched stainless steel swing. The black-edged tag read "THETA COMPANY," "ANDERSEN, TYR" and his blood type, identification number, and thauma practitioner status -- level two (barely registering as having any charge worth shaping,) non-practicing. The red-edged one, the medical, read "CLASSIFIED LVL.4," "AUTHORIZED MEDICAL PERSONNEL ONLY," "DO NOT RESUSCITATE."
Tended to end badly for the well-meaning guys attempting the resuscitating.
Not that he had ever needed it. As far as he remembered.
He nudged the tags again. Swing, swing, trailing arcs of reflected fluorescent light. He was going to need to have them changed, added to; two slashes at the end, and then a star, a staff-and-serpent symbol. Honorable Discharge, medical grounds. Not how he'd planned to leave the military.
Then again you weren't supposed to leave Theta Company otherwise than in a body bag. It was in his contract somewhere. Felt weird to be cut loose, body and brain both still filled with classified stuff.
He supposed with the war over and the demilitarization orders trickling through the ranks he counted as one more weapon to decommission. Made sense...
Except, no, it really didn't. What the hell were the brass thinking?
"Andersen, hey. Nice bling."
Tyr looked up at the man ambling down the corridor, already half out of uniform, dress jacket slung over his shoulder and only a grayish, shapeless old tanktop underneath. The effect was weird over the white riding pants and polished, knee-high black boots that comprised the rest of the dress uniform. He couldn't help a glance at his own chest, though, the unfamiliar pressure of the high collar against his throat a brief distraction, and the small row of silvery crosses that said, in order, "you did a good job," "until you got caught, alive," "but at least you escaped."
(It bothered him, that last one. He didn't remember the escape at all.)
(Maybe the Gwel had tried to resuscitate him. Teach them to read tags.)
"You got medals of your own," he said, voice quiet, a little raspy from being so silent for so long. Keller shrugged and gave his jacket a little shake, making the POW medal clink against his buttons.
"Yeah, I got a new one for that clusterfuck, and then I got a 'take that general discharge, Keller, or you're getting a dishonorable one, and I'll kick you in the knee too!'"
Tyr knew better than to encourage the man. He couldn't help but smile nevertheless, the corner of his lips tilting up against his best judgment. Keller's own heavy-lidded, mocking smile stretched out, lazy and satisfied.
"Waiting on Reynolds?"
"Mmh."
"Huh." A distant, thoughtful look flashed through Keller's eyes and then was swallowed by casual disinterest, like he'd been a bit surprised at first, and now wasn't. Tyr tilted his head a bit.
"You too, I take it?" he asked, for confirmation, and wasn't surprised at the shrug and the nod he got in response. Made sense, really. He and Keller had never really worked together long-term before, just met here and there, just like everyone else in Theta Company -- the brass didn't like it much when the experimental black ops soldiers bonded together enough to forget to be suicidal, which he'd been told happened...
(He missed Serrano. He didn't even know her that well either. He just... missed her. They hunted well together.)
... He and Keller had never really worked together long-term, until Tyr woke up one day to the door of his cell being kicked open and a dirty-blond man with a very non-regulation ponytail was shoved in, eyes wild and teeth bared. They'd been debriefed down to the bones already, several times in a row, but if yet another higher-up wanted to see them together, made sense it'd be related to that. Again.
Keller plopped down on the plastic chair beside him, making it creak under his weight. All muscle, of course, and he wasn't exactly a small man, broad-shouldered, arms thick; he made Tyr look even scrawnier by contrast, with his wiry muscles and long runner's legs.
Keller pulled a length of string from his pocket and started weaving a cat's cradle between his fingers, humming something annoyingly tuneless under his breath. Tyr watched; it was more interesting than watching his own tags swing, if not by very much. If he remembered right, Keller was a Thauma 3, not that much higher than he was. "Does it work?"
A shrug. "It's probability shifting. Who knows? Only way to measure would be to use it in a casino; solid numbers, easy to graph, and then I'd get banned up and down the coast."
"What are you shifting it toward?"
"General Mardsten getting gonorrhea."
"... Ah."
Another shrug; Keller flipped his hands face up and did something to the string with his little fingers that changed the whole pattern somehow. "His place is prolly plastered with anti-T, but whatever. Something to do, right?"
"You might consider taking up Solitaire."
At the bland comment Keller looked up at him and laughed, fingers twisting and tangling the strings blind.
He didn't lose his tangle even when the door they waited by opened and a secretary waved them in.
"Andersen, Keller. Come in."
The room they were ushered in wasn't overly large, but it had a high ceiling, a high window. Colonel Reynolds sat at her desk with her back to the glass, as if daring someone outside to take a potshot. At first Tyr only saw jet black hair, gathered in a low ponytail at her nape, as she bowed her head over a last quick note, and then she looked up and it was all arctic eyes -- wrinkles at the corners, barely noticeable; not so much because they were all that shallow as because the irises were too pale a blue and seemed to see right through an uncomfortable number of layers of cloth and flesh, possibly down to the bone, and it was hard to take much notice of the rest of her face past that.
Tyr came to a very regulation stop two steps before the polished desk. "Lieutenant Andersen, reporting as ordered," he said, snapping a salute, and staring conscientiously at the window frame a little to the left and over her head. Regulations didn't have it written in black on white that staring contests with a superior officer weren't done, but he'd always figured that was strongly implied.
Keller ambled in after him, still playing with his string even though he couldn't have been able to concentrate properly to complete the effect and the charge had to have been spilled and lost, a smile on his face challenging Reynolds to take issue with it.
Reynolds merely gave a pleasant smile, the faint expression made impossible to miss by the glistening coat of venous-red lipstick on her mouth. "I take it you've already completed and returned your severance paperwork, Lieutenant Keller."
Keller grinned back, the string undone now, twirled around a thumb, his whole body screaming 'hah! Not military anymore' with every inch of his loose stance, one hip cocked. "Yep."
"Oh, that's too bad." Another pleasant smile. Tyr winced, just barely. "I'm afraid there's been a little incident in the secretarial pool this morning. But I'm sure your paperwork has only been misled temporarily. Likely by next week it should all be fixed."
Keller's eyes narrowed; after a second of staring he gave a disgruntled huff and relaxed into the standard 'at ease' position, hands behind his back. Tyr could have told him he might as well spare himself the trouble.
"Andersen. I don't suppose you had the same regrettable incident with your own paperwork."
"... No ma'am. Haven't finished filling it."
"Good. Don't."
He stopped breathing, for a second. Out of sight his hand clenched on his wrist.
"...I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I didn't mean I could have you reinstated."
Her gaze was still cool, but her voice had softened with distant compassion. He gritted his teeth, fought to keep the rest of his face impassive, not to show her the disappointment. "Yes, ma'am."
He hadn't even really been happy in Theta company. He'd been useful, though; he'd had a purpose. He'd been in the army ever since he turned sixteen, for god's sake, what was he supposed to do now?
"Lieutenant, even putting aside your current health issues, you were a prisoner of war. We could not have put you back in the field--"
"Now that's bullshit," Keller interrupted. "The other branches maybe but Theta Company doesn't work like that."
Reynolds favored him with an unimpressed glance. "It does when there's significant mental trauma."
Keller turned to look at Tyr, eyes bright with disturbingly casual interest. "Got any mental trauma?"
"I have no idea. I can't remember most of what happened over there." Tyr narrowed his eyes, annoyed by the display, wanting to annoy back. "You neither. Right?"
"Oh, yeah, sure. Total amnesia."
For a brief, very brief moment, Tyr watched the man before him and saw not a battlefield comrade or a fellow human being but a lot of noisy, bothersome meat. Potentially dangerous meat, but even predators were food, once they were dead.
There were a lot of teeth in that grinning mouth. Challenge. He'd have to be faster.
"... I'm sorry, ma'am. You were saying?"
She couldn't know what had just gone through his head; his expression hadn't changed one iota. It hadn't even lasted that long. The way she tilted her head, though... and then she waved it off.
"I will be frank." A quick shrug. "You'd have heard it on the grapevine soon enough anyway. Part of our peace treaty with the Gwel rests on us getting rid of any therianthropes in our ranks. Of course both sides know that's not going to happen, not when you've proven so effective, but if we want the peace to stick we have to at least pretend we will. Hence a lot of your most damaged colleagues, who would otherwise have been allowed to go back to," he liked that she didn't sugar-coat it like most people outside of Theta company did, "suicide missions, are going to need to be shuffled out of the military on disability."
Tyr took it in with a suitably thoughtful pause. "Permission to speak freely?"
"Granted."
"It makes no sense."
She smiled at him; he felt like an unexpectedly clever child being patted on the head. His eyes narrowed; he stared back, even knowing he shouldn't.
"It doesn't. We're being released into the civilian population, as is? We're dangerous." He forced his eyes closed. He still felt Keller's presence beside him like a buzz on his skin, an irritant; not comfortable enough to be an ally, therefore potential threat. He still felt the unvoiced challenge in her stare, the challenge that he had to concede even though she hadn't proven herself to him yet. The next admission was hard to push out of his throat. "We're only going to get worse."
The therianthrope experiment had never been meant to be stable long-term. It couldn't be; the suppressants alone were hell on the kidneys, for one.
And then there were the... other issues, the ones the suppressants were meant to keep down.
The ones that made them such a double-edged weapon.
"The doctors all say so, yes." Her next words were carefully measured, tracking the two of them so she wouldn't lose the smallest flicker of expression. "It'll get worse before it gets better."
Even knowing she was dissecting him in her head didn't stop Tyr from twitching, from staring right back at her again. "Better? Do you know what you're saying, ma'am?"
"The likelihood of survival is low, yes. The likelihood of sanity is lower." She turned her hand face up, red-tipped nails fanning open, like letting something inconsequential fly away. "Would you rather give up and die now? I know you have a gun. The morgue is one floor down."
His next reaction was inexcusable -- uncharacteristic, too, nothing like him, but he couldn't stop it, couldn't keep his upper lip from curling back and a snarl from rattling out from some place deep in his chest. Beside him Keller had gone all hunting-still and watchful, waiting. Tyr clawed his way back to his usual calm, yanked it back to himself, tried to untwist his face, bank the ... whatever it was that shone through his eyes and wasn't him, wasn't.
If he hadn't been on his way out already, he thought with a distant sinking feeling, this would probably do it.
"Very good," she said, low and quiet, and a little throaty with pure satisfaction.
"--Ma'am?"
"I wanted to be sure. We do tend to select you Theta people based on a certain willingness to die..."
"For our country. For the survival of our species. Not for -- just because."
Keller snorted quietly. He didn't interrupt, though, head tilted like this was all very fascinating and not any of his business.
"Some do anyway. But you fought your way back to camp. You survived. I'm glad to see it wasn't an accident."
He gritted his teeth, for a second, and then he told himself to stop being so raw and think. She was sounding him -- them -- out for something. He was ... still needed. Still technically a part of the military -- stuck in administrative limbo, still, and that wasn't going to last, but not completely severed yet.
She was selling them something. Did he want to buy?
"In any case, Lieutenant Keller might have been right before the peace treaty was signed. We accounted for a high rate of attrition, but now the war is over... we have all those good soldiers who risked life and limb and sanity to gain us an edge, and we have nowhere to put them, and no more missions for them to go out in a blaze of glory." Her voice went quieter. "There's only so many spots with the Border Patrol, and Theta Company is not suited to security detail for politicians, is it? Even now, being in the city is costing you."
The city was less of a problem than the press of people in it. He was sure it never used to be so bad before his stint as a POW and subsequent medication withdrawal. Alright, he hadn't really used his leave for the last three years -- staying on base between missions was no problem -- but he would have remembered that, wouldn't he? He didn't want Reynolds to be right.
Keller finally got bored. He shifted his weight to one foot, arms crossed on his chest. "How about you cut to the chase?"
Bland, nice-weather-we're-having voice. "Your miraculous return was a little more public than people would have preferred, so you couldn't be disappeared."
... there, now this he could get. Even his blood work was classified, and now that his suppressants were failing he was a threat to public safety, and he understood he couldn't be relied upon to do his job anymore, had to be let go, and in their Company that meant death. He didn't want that to happen, but he would have understood why.
Looked like the right hand still didn't know what the left hand was doing, and now the left hand was left juggling dropped pieces before they hit the ground.
"The fallback plan is to wait until the first public disturbance report and have you brought back in to the high security hospital wing. You wouldn't be getting back out. That'd be poor repayment, though..."
"Pff, my left butt cheek."
Reynolds allowed herself a smile at Keller's comment. "... That, and you may still have an use."
"Aha, that's more like it. So are you going to cut to the chase or are there some more insinuations and 'look how benevolent we are' bullshit to stuff in first?"
"We're assembling a group of people in similar situations to yours. Accidental suppressant withdrawal, medical contraindication, rejection..." A flip of her open hand. "There's a chance you might survive. There's even a chance you might come out on the other side sane. There's a chance you might lose it and have to be put down. We need to know how and why it happens, what we need for a successful integration. I need you to volunteer to spend the rest of your withdrawal period there. There'll be..." The hesitation that followed there was the first real one he'd heard. "...people who can deal with the results. Whatever those results be."
People who could deal? As in... what, snipers? Tyr breathed out. Probably doctors, specialists. Maybe some other Theta Company guys whose meds were still working perfectly well, for security.
"And then we walk out and all is sunshine and butterflies."
Reynolds' next look was tired. Not at the end of her patience yet, but her face said it was coming up. "Keller, you're a pain in the ass, but that isn't a hanging offence yet. We have no interest in wasting our time figuring out how to rehabilitate you, only to lock you up anyway and throw away the key. What would be the point?"
"Classified stuff?"
"You've signed confidentiality agreements. Respect them. No problem." A little sigh, eyes narrowed as she looked them over. "So. Yes, no?"
"Where?"
"A ranch, a half-hour out of town. It's a big place. You won't have to share rooms, and there's no neighbors. We just ask that you follow the recommendations of our advisors."
Keller made a scoffing noise. "Nice big isolated space... Got coordinates? I was thinking of buying a bike, maybe I'll feel like going that way sometime next week..."
"I was planning to put you on a jeep with the supplies delivery. Corporal Lugvaner will hitch a ride back with Doctor Abram tomorrow and you can keep it for transport. We're not planning to stop you from going into town entirely; just discuss it with the advisors first."
"Today?" Tyr asked.
"Did you have anything else planned?"
He'd mostly planned to get himself a hotel room and spend the night staring at his service handgun, the one he'd been gifted as a thank-you-bye. Oh well. Being a test subject (again) wasn't exactly a long hoped-for career move, but better than being let out into the street and then conveniently hit by a truck no one would ever identify. "...Nothing I can't put off."
"Good. That's settled. Of course all your living expenses will be covered during that time... Lieutenant Keller?"
Keller eyed her. Eyed Tyr. Tyr watched him back from the corner of his eye. He ... didn't know the other man well -- only knew he redefined 'attitude problem', and Tyr really shouldn't find him amusing as often as he did, and (Tyr had bled on him) (they'd bled on each other) they'd survived the same thing together. (Even if he could only remember the first couple of days with anything approaching clarity, and after that nothing but flashes and feelings and impressions.)
It should be a bonding experience, he'd been told, something to forge lifelong friendships on, only it felt weird, Keller having seen too many things and Tyr not knowing what he'd shown, how far down he had bared himself, and besides they'd been separated the second they got into camp.
He would ... appreciate having a not-unfamiliar face, wherever they were going. But it wasn't his place to ask. He had nothing to presume on, and he wasn't going to do Reynolds' job for her, either.
"Hrrm. Oh well. Might as well see it. I reserve the right to up and leave whenever I damn well feel like it."
"You do?" Reynolds replied, a dark eyebrow arched in cultured mockery.
Keller's smile back was wide and pleasant and utterly fake. "And while we're at it, drop the bullshit with the secretarial pool and my release papers, because annoying as it is, it's not going to hold me."
Staring contest.
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."
And now it was a Mexican stand-off, only there was a faint little smile at the corner of her mouth that said even with a ticked off therianthrope who outweighed her by half again her own body weight, Colonel Reynolds was still amused.
"You'll get confirmation by letter sometime this week." A silky, blood-colored smile. "We do, after all, know where to find you."
She shifted in her chair, opened a drawer, her attention already moving away from the two of them. "You'll find Corporal Lugvaner waiting in the courtyard by the west exit. I trust you can find your way. Dismissed."
Tyr snapped a salute, mostly by reflex, before turning on his heels and walking to the door; Keller crossed his arms again, glowered at her dark head a last time, and followed.
The fluorescent lights and strange plasticky smells were still bothersome, but this time Tyr wasn't fighting not to think. There'd be a lot to think about, once he got to the ranch, but he had made his decision, and now all was left was to wait for further data.
He had a purpose again. For how long, he didn't know, but that was fine. He could wait.
At his side Keller pulled out his string again and started fiddling away, though by the face he was making and the knots he ended up with, it was obvious he was still too nettled for it to go well.
"Goddamn. There's nothing to shift with that woman that I can get at."
Tyr snorted quietly. "You do know that even if it doesn't work, cursing people is a misdemeanor?"
"So's burning police cars." A shrug; Keller tugged his fingers free and let the string fall back into his palm. And then he turned to Tyr and gifted him with another of those 'trust me, I'm not a shark' grins that seemed to unveil about a hundred teeth. "So. You seem interested. Want me to teach you string theory?"
Tyr blinked, stared at him, an eyebrow going up against his best judgment. "... Don't even pretend you don't know that's not what string theory is."
"Come on, you know you want to." He waggled bushy dark blond eyebrows. "I'll show you how to Jacob someone off their ladder."
Oh, goddamnit. Tyr didn't want to like Keller. He was unpredictable and deliberately contrary and an irritant, and-- "Bloodthirsty, and a dork."
Keller clutched at his chest. "Ow, straight through my heart."
"Your heart's on the other side," Tyr informed him placidly. Keller obligingly shifted his clutching hand from the right side of his chest to the left.
He didn't want to find Keller likeable. He did anyway. Okay. That was fine.
Likeable didn't have to mean trustworthy.
+
With traffic in the way 'a half hour' ended up closer to forty-five minutes; the base wasn't in the middle of the city, but they had to go around for a little bit. After that the road arrowed away through fields and woods... and then fields... and some more fields. Surprisingly, Keller didn't chat away the whole time, with either Tyr or the driver, or fidget with his string or the buttons and straps and cushion seats.
Tyr suspected it was because he was having enough fun as it was in the backseat, sitting at the very edge of Lugvaner's field of vision and staring holes through the side of his head, every inch of him still as only a predator waiting for that perfect moment to pounce could be.
A small part of Tyr saw the increasingly restless glances the poor Corporal kept throwing back -- reminiscent of a deer knowing better than to leave cover and run, but on the edge of losing to fear and doing it anyway -- and was almost tempted to join in.
"Uh -- look, there we are! Ten more minutes."
He turned on a little side road, surrounded with high wire fences; a short moment later they were driving under a rustic-looking wooden gate decorated with horseshoes. And some more fences.
The previous owners must have been raising champion jumping horses, because the fences were pretty high. Higher than two horses standing on top of each other, even. Necks included.
The owners must also have sold very recently, because, while the posts were weathered, the wire on it showed not a touch of rust anywhere; it was also more densely packed than any type of cattle would have needed.
There was a dead crow on the side of the road. High voltage, huh.
"We spent the whole war infiltrating high-security bases and destroying them," he mused, low and slow, head tilted back so he could talk to Keller without having to look away from the rows and rows of shiny, brand-new electric fence. "Going around sabotaging anything we could get our hands on." He shook his head, mildly disgusted. "A wire fence? Really?"
Keller started grinning a grin like knives, if knives also had teeth. "Hey. First five ways you can think of to get past it with just the contents of your pockets."
It was a silly game and Corporal Lugvaner's eyes were getting a bit too round, and it might not be a great idea to make the guy doubt their sanity any more than...
... ah, who was he kidding, everyone in the other branches already thought Theta guys could flip and kill you seven times before you hit the ground. And then go to buy dinner with the contents of your pockets, went the joke, and no therianthrope had ever done anything but smile thinly, lips pressed together, and not mention that there was no need to bother, that you could be dinner.
"... Can I pick up stuff from the ground?"
"Hm. Seven ways, then."
Tyr pointed at a dead tree they were going past, a little way away from the fence. "Climb, swing from that branch, jump over. Dig underneath." No shovel, but he'd done it with his hands before. (His hands had come away bloody, nails cracked, but once you fell into the rhythm it came so, so easily.) "Kick a post until it breaks. Throw my jacket over the top wire and jump over." He paused, thought about it for another second. "Destroy the power generator."
Keller was laughing to himself in the backseat. "Well, if you wanna be unsubtle about it."
"Uh. It's -- it's for the coyotes. The fence, I mean. Sir."
Tyr and Keller snorted together. Stay in one place for a whole month? There wouldn't be a coyote for miles around the ranch in under a week.
"Yeah, s'why the generator is on the other side of the fence from where we'll be." Huh. It was. The fence retreated, a little farther ahead; there was a shack, where the wires went. "Guess you can throw your stuff off the ground at it, Andersen."
Tyr was still counting under his breath. "Use rocks to crush wires... Use the water trough to short circuit it... Use the trough as a stepladder, use a stick to hold wires apart wide enough to slip through, take a running start and kick off a fence post and jump over..."
Coyotes. Motherfucking coyotes.
Mulvaner'd probably been ordered to make a report on them.
"... get pissed off and plow right through..."
Keller leaned forward between the two front seats and peered at him. "You forgot 'pick the fence lock.'"
"I don't have lockpicks." He tilted his head, considering, and then touched the butt of the gun under his arm. "I do have bullets."
"If you grit your teeth any harder you'll break something."
--Goddamnit.
"Also you'll start making those really annoying screakchy noises."
"Shut up, Keller."
"Uh huh. Hey, Lug. Pull over."
There was a second where the guy's -- the kid's, really -- eyes went all the way ringed with white and panic flowed from him, sharp and strong, and Tyr went tense all over in his seat.
"No, I can't -- we're -- we're almost here anyway, sir, you--"
"Do it." Lugvaner was parked in the next five seconds. Tyr stayed in his seat, breathing slowly in and out. He could smell grass and warm asphalt and heated tires. It was ... not nice, but it wasn't acrid (mouth-watering) like fear.
"Okay, out. We're continuing on foot."
"Don't order me around," Tyr said in a very calm, controlled voice, staring right ahead through the windshield.
"Goddamnit, Andersen, if I have to drag you out--"
The noise that came from his throat then wasn't anything a human body ought to be able to produce. He sat, muscles stiff all over, fingertips creasing the door handle, struggling with himself to keep from turning back and face Keller because if he did he knew they'd fight; he would start it.
"You're scaring the kid," Keller said quietly. Tyr flinched.
He could see hands clenched on the wheel, knuckles bloodless. He undid the seatbelt and picked up the backpack between his feet, and was out of the jeep in two seconds. He started walking, ignoring the "Sir!" behind him.
Keller didn't follow, not for a minute or two, and after that he left Tyr his space. A short moment after that the Jeep started again, though it kept going at a crawl so as not to close the distance.
Tyr was being ridiculous. What the hell was this about, anyway? What was the matter with that stupid, pointless fence? Maybe the people who'd set it up were just afraid a nice and sweet family taking a walk one weekend would cross through at the wrong time. Like when one of the therianthropes was out having a good nice sulk.
He'd be such a liability on the field, being so... touchy, moody, something like that.
(He wanted to hurt something, to fight, to tear into something -- someone, same thing, didn't matter -- he wanted to run and run and never stop, he wanted to get away from here. Get out of the low, dug-in path, walled in by high embankments and higher metal nets, making the fine dusting of dark hair on his arms prickle up from the electric charge in them.)
"... Tyr?"
He didn't respond, but the way his shoulders drew in was proof enough he'd heard. Keller drew a little closer, but stayed several steps behind him, on the other side of the road.
"Claustrophobia, huh?" Keller said, and while yes, it might have been partly that, what it was was an excuse.
Going with it wouldn't be a true lie of omission, he knew Keller didn't believe himself either, but it would feel like one anyway. Saving face by lying to each other and pretending they believed it.
"I'm slipping."
A long moment of silence. Good. Keller wasn't dismissing it like it was another joke. He'd have to hurt him if he was.
"Not the farthest you've ever slipped," he said, and Tyr stopped on the spot and turned to stare at him, stomach clenching. Keller looked back, hands in his pockets -- see, no threat -- face serious as it rarely was. "It's not like it's a one-way street. Might be harder the other way, I'm not saying, but it's not impossible either."
"I -- slipped farther before. Huh." He couldn't imagine that. He didn't want to imagine that. He was still himself now, just spiraling closer and closer to that huge black hole at the center, so little in the way of brakes to control himself. He didn't know what would be there, when he went over the edge. What would be there waiting in the dark.
"Oh man, yeah, you have no idea, this is really nothing in comparison."
Tyr stared, incredulous. "Of course I have no idea, you won't fucking tell me what happened."
"Yep. And I still won't." He grinned suddenly. "Doesn't seem to be necessary anyway. See? Now you want to plant a fist in my face instead of eating it. All better!"
"I could do both," Tyr growled, but he was already deflating, because the asshole was right. He sighed, glanced at the jeep -- was Lugvaner even older than eighteen? He didn't look it -- and turned away to resume trudging his way to the supposed ranch they were apparently so close to, not that he could see much but fences and the top of high swinging grass and the sky from down there. He felt corralled, funneled like cattle, he -- "Talk to me."
"Sure. About?"
"Anything you want." A blink. "Where did you learn my first name?" There was only a T. Andersen on his tags. Keller even pronounced it almost-right, Teer instead of Tire or Tear. (No one anywhere in the whole of the Vinland continent, north or south, seemed to be able to figure out quite the right nuance with the vowel, which was a bit frustrating and a lot confusing considering the history of the settlement of the continent, but he'd gotten used to that. Just a matter of accents.)
"How else? You told me."
... Damn it. He looked away, embarrassed. He hated having to ask, to admit exactly how much he'd lost. "What else did I...?"
"Not much. I remembered because calling you Andersen didn't get your attention."
Calling him Tyr did. Get his attention back from what? How far down had he gone? How much of himself had he lost? He breathed in deep, trying to banish the thought from his head. He had himself back now. Hadn't lost anything. (Except his control. Except his stability. He'd slipped before. It would keep happening, more and more often, until...) "Well, if you know mine..."
"Oh no no no, that's so not a fair trade. I mean your name's weird, okay, but not that weird."
Tyr stared at him wordlessly. Keller stared back, mulish.
"Oh well. I'm sure Reynolds must know."
"Urgh. You'd ask her? Traitor." A huff, not even half serious. "Fine, fine. It's Dian. Don't call me that."
"Like Diana? Moon goddess?"
"Goddess of the hunt, thanks." A huff, raking his hand through shoulder blade-length hair, so far past regulation it wasn't funny. Tyr's own overgrown, bristly crew cut really didn't seem bad in comparison.
"Were you supposed to be a girl?" he asked, eyeing the thick biceps and the scruffy three-days beard doubtfully. Was that all in knee-jerk reaction? Hm.
"Oh, look, the ranch. Whee."
Heh. "Subtle."
"Fuck you very much."
After a short incline there was another gate, decorated with prosperity sigils and some more horseshoes, and then a sprawling, two-story building that seemed to be comprised mostly of refurbished granges strung together and grafted onto an old stone-walled house.
An older woman in a white doctor's blouse was walking back and forth on the gravel path before the white-painted porch, checking her watch every three steps. Her head jerked up when she saw them coming, and for a moment it seemed as if she would come stalking up to them, but she reined herself in, waiting for them at the bottom of the wooden steps.
"Welcome. I'm Doctor Abram. I'll be in charge of your medical care." She held out a dark hand with short-clipped, iridescent nails to shake, though her eyes were watchful, possibly wary. She wasn't letting herself be afraid, though, shoulders pulled back and head held high, so Tyr nodded back and took it, shook.
"Lieutenant Andersen. This is Lieutenant Keller."
"You're late. Did anything happen?" Her eyes glanced at the road, relaxed minutely when the Jeep crept out through the gate and went to park on the gravel. Lugvaner's hands were set very properly onto the wheel and he steered like it required all his attention.
"Traffic first, and then we just felt like walking the rest of the way," Keller said with a pleasant smile that almost reached his eyes, and made a 'no matter' hand gesture, like throwing away something unimportant over his shoulder.
"I see. Well, gentlemen, if you'll follow me, I'll show you around." She led the way up the porch steps; they trailed after her. Lugvaner was busying himself with a couple of crates taken from the back of the jeep and a side door by where he'd parked. "You'll have the rest of the day to settle in and meet the other patients. Tomorrow we'll have a group discussion -- we want everyone to be clear on the goals we mean to accomplish here and the means we have to accomplish it, so yes, that does mean it's mandatory, Lieutenant Keller."
Tyr blinked a bit, glanced back. Keller was making a face. "I'm not technically in the army anymore."
"If you're not going to play the game, you might as well leave now," Tyr said, and shrugged. "It won't be of any use to you." He wondered how far the brass would let Keller get, though. Then again they knew how to drop off the radar. Maybe that'd buy him some time.
"It'll get me free food. Anyway. You were saying?"
Abrams didn't comment, just kept going with the spiel; meals were at these times, kitchen was not usually off-limits but the cook's fridge was, please use the other fridge in case you needed snacks and here was the list to request what to get it refilled with (huh, unusually generous there), a lounge room and TV through here, reunion room there, doctor's office, psychiatrist's office, and through the communicating room they now were in, one of the grange extensions. It had been divided into rooms -- fairly recently if Tyr believed the smells of cement, fresh paint and plaster tickling his nose. A staircase at the end of the corridor went up to the second story, under the roof.
"Lots of rooms."
"They won't all be occupied for a good long while. We're starting with a small group. You are free to choose the room you want, provided it isn't already in use. There are only three other people here at this time, though; you have a lot left to choose from."
Keller went straight for the staircase. Tyr took his time and looked through one of the open doors, and the next. They all seemed kind of similar to him; a bit small, though bigger than the dorms; a bed, a desk under the window, (no bars on the window,) a dresser, but the rooms on the left side of the corridor seemed to contain single beds and the ones on the right bunks. "I thought we didn't have to share?"
The doctor looked mildly uncomfortable for a moment. "You don't have to, but some might prefer it."
"... You're going to let us partner up? Long term?"
He couldn't describe what the feeling that shot through him right there was. Theta Company didn't like its members to get too close to each other, kept breaking up buddies, shuffling them with different people. They never really had time to get to know each other more than surface-deep, get too attached. The official reason was that you might have to work with a stranger at some point and not know how to deal, and it was better to know a variety of people. There were only so many of them out there, though, and some skills were just complementary, so on and off people would meet again.
Tyr didn't mind working like that, he never had; ever since childhood he'd been a solitary boy, fine on his own so long as he had a book, could go bird-watching or biking around or... whatever, it was all fine.
"Those who wish it, yes. It, ah, it has been pointed out recently that it might actually be a stabilizing factor. In that case."
"Huh."
"For those still serving, the disadvantages outweigh this, and besides the medication is supposed to keep that suppressed anyway, but for retired therianthropes... I'm afraid I'm not well-versed enough in psychological effects to discuss this, but our specialist will be there tomorrow."
Tyr drifted back to the right side of the corridor, the bunk beds. Briefly he considered asking Keller if he wanted to share, but if he had to live with the man he'd probably strangle him in his sleep. Besides Keller still felt... dangerous, unknown. There would be very little sleep to be had.
Upstairs a chair or some other piece of furniture was dragged against a wooden floor; light footsteps made their way to the staircase and down. Not Keller's, Keller didn't make any noise when he moved.
He'd only seen combat boots and camo pants when he stiffened, nostrils wide, aware that the doctor was watching him and unable to care, to mind, because he knew it, he knew her.
She'd dropped weight since the last time they met, hollowing out her cheeks a bit too much, lengthening a face that didn't really need any more length added to it. Underneath corkscrew bangs a white bandage covered her right eye, contrasting with usually bronzed, now unhealthy sallow skin; pink, raised scars, still new, crawled their way up her forehead a bit, cut across the yellow bruise on her cheek to curl around the edge of her jaw.
She came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs and watched him, and he watched her back. Hands in her pockets, spine loose, hazel-green eye heavy-lidded, almost uncaring, and then she quirked him a barely-there smile.
She was here, with the disabled, rejected ones. She wasn't out in the field, or in the infirmary waiting for the accelerated healing factor to kick in.
Which meant the eye was gone. You could only heal what was still there.
"He dead?" he asked, almost casual.
He hadn't expected Serrano to laugh -- chuckle, really, but still. He was relaxing somehow before she even said, "He is."
"Figured." Well then. It was probably better than losing a leg. "Want to bunk together?"
"Sure."
Behind her Keller leaned out of the staircase and leered. "What is this? Coed bedroom? Is that even allowed?"
Oh. Right. Tyr looked over his shoulder at Doctor Abram, who was still observing from behind, with a strange expression he couldn't read. "Doctor?"
"... It's fine, it's fine. What you do on your own time is your own business. Just make sure to visit the infirmary for proper supplies if--"
"We're not having sex," Serrano interrupted, voice bland, though there was faint amusement in the quirk of her lips. She looked back at Tyr, tilted her head in invitation. "Which room do you want?"
Tyr shrugged, pointed at the door just beside her. Under the staircase would be fine; he'd hear people coming and going better.
"Alright. I'll get my bag."
Tyr nodded and turned his head to track her down the corridor until she disappeared in some other bedroom, and then pushed the chosen door open. He threw his backpack on the top bunk, turned around to find Keller with his shoulder propped up on the doorjamb, eyebrows up and looking much too entertained.
"What do you want?"
"Introductions? That'd be nice. I don't think we've ever been assigned together." Keller looked from him to her, who was coming back, taking her in from head to boots and then back up.
"Serrano, scouting. Keller, demolitions."
"Hey there." Keller's smile quirked weird, eyes gone heavy-lidded. Sarcastic? Something like that. "You guys know each other long?"
"Boot camp, I guess."
"Aha. Barely enrolled, your sweet sixteen..."
Tyr had indeed enrolled at eight AM sharp on the first day he was legally able to, but that was a weird way to say that. There was nothing sweet about being a teenage Private, especially one suicidal and susceptible to propaganda enough to say yes to a Black Ops program, and approached deliberately because they had no family to get too curious on their behalf.
"Serrano's a year older." Tyr shrugged. "We're at opposite ends of the alphabet though." Keller blinked a bit, like something Tyr had said had confused him, so he explained a bit more. "...I mean that even after we went into Theta Company we didn't get assigned together much. No reason to talk."
Serrano's lips were twitching. "Mnh. Guess we should count our anniversary from that first field mission, then," she said, tone excessively bland. Keller made an annoyed face.
"... Alright, what did I miss?"
"Nothing," they said as one. Tyr frowned. No confession followed, so in the end he just sighed and dropped it.
"Where are the last two?"
Serrano shrugged. "Tarek, kitchen. Sullivan, bedroom, closed door." So the first one would be busy, and the second one wouldn't want to be disturbed. Oh well, he'd meet them at dinner.
The room would be fine to sleep in, but standing there with the window closed and Keller still lounging in the doorway made him a little twitchy.
"Going on recon," he decided. He didn't like not knowing how much terrain he had to work with. "Coming?"
Keller studied him for a couple of seconds and then shook his head no. "Gonna take a nap upstairs, I think. You kids have fun... not too much fun, though." He turned around to leave, waving goodbye over his shoulder.
Tyr turned to his roommate, who was sitting on her bunk, tightening her bootlaces.
"What was that about?"
"He's not sure he believes us about not having sex."
Tyr gave her a baffled look. "... Why would we lie about that? We're not in each other's chain of command. It's not against regulations."
She grinned at him with white teeth, raised scars bunching up so it went asymmetrical. Tyr wasn't really sure what he'd done to deserve it.
The corridor was empty, Doctor Abram gone at some point, Keller upstairs, no watchdog in sight.
Surely they'd have security in place. At least to protect the doctors and the cook, just in case. The people in charge wouldn't be that crazy.
Tyr stepped back in the room and closed the door. Serrano arched her eyebrow at him; he nodded to the window, went there in silence. The frame stuck a bit, but when he yanked, the windowpane shifted up. A quick glance outside... The slope wasn't bad, they weren't even a full body length away from the ground. Ridiculously easy. He glanced back, even as he sat on the desk and swung his legs around over the ledge, his head tilted in question.
She huffed out a breath that would have been a laugh with a little more noise in it and pulled herself to her feet. He jumped; the gravel was noisy under his feet, couldn't be helped, but he thought that might be a good thing. He'd want advance warning if anyone came that close to his window.
He could already breathe easier.
Crunch; she landed beside him. Fields on their left, more fence, hollows and slopes and mounds, solitary trees. In front, posts marking separate horse enclosures, barely chest-high. On their right, some distance away, a wood; no way to tell how deep, where the fence was. "Where to first?"
For the first time today he caught her hesitating.
"Haven't gone on preliminary recon yet?" he asked, a little surprised.
A few seconds went by, silent.
"The ground isn't as flat as it looks," she admitted, voice carefully sterilized of any emotional content.
... Huh.
When he looked at her she was gazing at the horizon, head turned away from him so the bandaged side of her face wouldn't be visible.
"I'll go first. If I trip, go around."
He could have told her they could take it easy, it wasn't real recon and there were no gwel waiting in the bushes, maybe deer at the very most. He could have told her they could walk. But no, they couldn't.
For one thing she might have kicked him. Or worse, chosen not to come.
He started at a jog; she was on his heels the next second, and then they were on grass and passing the first wooden fence, going through the first paddock, where no human had walked there in weeks or longer to leave paths. The overgrown grass was damp with recent rain, slowly soaking through his pants and trying to wrap around his ankles and trip him; and it made sense to lengthen his stride, to fall into that old ground-eating clip, so he could just tear through.
She ran with him; they fanned out, bodies low to the ground, all their senses scanning ahead with relentless intensity, hunting the wind -- things that weren't there. He heard her trip sometimes, fall out of synch, go the long way around obstacles she could have cleared at a jump, and it threw him, made him tense for a second or two each time, but they'd learned to hunt together once before; they could do it again.
There were bumps and hollows and bushes on the ranch's grounds, little pockets of solemn, silent woods, and sometimes it was almost as if the electric fence wasn't there at all.
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J'ai pas du tout été déçue déjà , hein, pour te rassurer ^^
L'inconvénient d'avoir lu tout ce que tu écris ou presque depuis GW c'est que je repère tes stéréotypes - l'avantage, c'est que je repère tout ce qui fait que tu as travaillé tes personnages, les a changé, amélioré, pour en faire des vrais personnages à toi à part entière. Ils ont une consistance, une voix, une personnalité qui les empêche d'être juste "on prend les mêmes, on change le nom et on les met ailleurs".
J'aime beaucoup les personnages que tu as introduits pour l'instant, notamment Colonel Reynolds et Serrano (ce qui est rare, d'habitude je prête pas beaucoup attention aux personnages féminins, mais elles ont l'air très badass toutes les deux). J'aime la façon très méthodique mais pas totalement logique de penser de Tyr, les petits apartés comme "It was probably better than losing a leg" qui nous donnent envie d'en savoir plus sur pourquoi il raisonne comme ça. Et ça façon de ne pas ménager Serrano pour leur petite sortie est adorable d'une certaine façon. J'ai un peu envie de donner des baffes à Keller mais il a l'air intéressant avec son "j'en sais plus mais je dirai rien, na".
Et l'univers que tu a construit autour est laisse entrevoir est très alléchant ^^ avec les petits détails sur le fonctionnement des militaires, la pseudo-demilitarisation, la propagande, le "thauma" thing qui me perturbe pas mal xD
A propos de ça tient, tu te questionnai sur tes types de garou l'autre fois (ton problème de cheveux) et en réfléchissant pour une de mes histoires j'ai été confrontée à un problème aussi, je me demandai ce que toi tu avais décidé. Si c'est spoiler ignore ma question ?
Est ce que ce qui en fait des garous est du coté magique (ici ça à l'air d'être non), plutôt type virus/pathologie qui se transmet par le sang/la salive/ect, ou plutôt type génétique ?
Mon soucis avec le coté virus c'est la transmission, faudrait avoir des parents cinglé pour infecter leur propre bébé même si c'est la tradition familiale, mais ça permet de contaminer des individus hors de la famille. Mon problème pour le coté génétique, c'est que j'arrive pas trop à concevoir une garou porter une grossesse à terme, donc ça voudrait dire que le gène est récessif chez les femmes pour permettre à la ligné de survivre, résultat pas de garou femmes et pas de contamination.
(oups this got outta hand XD désolé)
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L'inconvénient d'avoir lu tout ce que tu écris ou presque depuis GW c'est que je repère tes stéréotypes
Ah ca. .___.;; Je devrais sans doute faire plus d'efforts pour faire original. (méheu. ;_;)
Je suis super contente que tu aimes les persos .__. (et Keller est fait pour être chiant sur les bords, donc tant mieux. XD) Quand aux persos féminins je crois que pour le moment sur une dizaine j'en ai une qui soit du genre passive/faible/victime, toutes les autres sont kickass à leur manière. XD C'est pas cool sinon!
Ici j'ai opté pour fluides corporels transmettent la composante génétique (donc c'est pas comme dans garou, on se transforme en l'animal qui nous a mordu) mais ca ne se développe comme il faut qu'avec une certaine charge magique derrière. (plus de succès si on est compatible avec l'animal en question, et/ou d'autres garous de la même espèce sont autour et supportent l'individu; la violence de l'attaque, en tant que rituel barbare mais puissant, aide aussi à pénétrer les défenses magiques de l'individu... ca marche moins bien avec une contagion par seringue. Oups.) Donc mes garous ont des enfants garous... Quand ils arrivent à se reproduire. Il y a un taux d'avortement spontanés assez élevé; en fait on ne considère pas une femme comme enceinte jusqu'à ce que les bébés commencent à bouger, parce que c'est le signe qu'ils se transforment avec la mère pendant la pleine lune. Sinon ils sont avortés automatiquement.
Je peux voir comment ca peut être justifié, le côté récessif chez les femmes, mais ca me rend pas mal triste. C'est pas juuuuste. ;__; En plus ca aurait des répercussions sur les dynamiques de meute. Si tu veux explorer ca, ca peut probablement être chouette quand même (si les femmes ont quand même qqch de lupinesque mis à part ne pas pouvoir se transformer, genre comportement/instincts/sens), mais sinon... Hrrrm.
Mais franchement, un virus, les parents ont pas besoin d'infecter leur bébé délibérément si on décide que la lycanthropie passe la barrière placentaire. Là on entre dans la question "est-ce qu'être un garou est si horrible qu'il pousse la grande majorité des gens à tout faire pour ne pas se reproduire?" Pour quelqu'un qui a vécu longtemps comme ça, c'est probablement pas si terrible comparé au désir d'enfant.
Si on va sur lycanthropie = malédiction il pourrait y avoir un côté malédiction familiale, et des normaux pourraient accidentellement se faire maudire aussi à l'âge adulte, dépend comment ça marche. Et puis par exemple dans garou j'avais poussé un taux de mortalité incroyable pour justifier que le monde entier n'était pas au courant et qu'ils étaient super rares, mais si c'est un univers où les gens sont au courant qu'ils existent tu peux faire un truc bien moins mortel et bien plus contagieux, pour qu'il y ait plus d'accidents? Dans ce cas peut-être même que les femmes garou ne peuvent pas porter de grossesse à terme et toute la reproduction se fait via contagion et adoption.
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En relisant ma question je me suis rendu compte que oui, le virus pourrai passer la barrière placentaire effectivement. Je crois que c'est ce qui m'arrangerai le plus xD
Je suis du genre a commencé à jouer avec mes persos avant de savoir où je vais, et j'avais pas envie d'effacer ce que j'ai déjà u___u (aka une maman et son fiston garou)
C'est pareil je trouverai ça injuste si les filles peuvent pas être garou ^^; intéressant à explorer peut être, mais pas ce que j'ai envie de faire là . Le taux élèvé d'avortement spontanée est plutôt logique (sachant que la possibilité qu'un oeuf fécondé s'installe est déjà franchement basse au naturel...), sauf si on opte pour une lycanthropie contrôlée où il n'y a pas de transformation 'obligatoire' de pleine lune ? Dans ce cas je suppose qu'une louve peut décider d'éviter de se transformer le temps de sa grossesse...hmmm.
Bref, je vais essayer de brainstormer un peu plus sur mon univers comme une grande.
Et j'ai hate de lire la suite et d'en savoir plus sur la section Theta ^w^
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No time to do a thorough beta-check, but here are a few minor weirdnesses:
Then again you weren't supposed to leave Theta Company otherwise than in a body bag. Change 'otherwise than' to either 'other than' or 'except'. I'd go with 'except' -- it's more standard -- if you don't mind repeating that word twice within three short paragraphs. You use it shortly thereafter to start a sentence: Except, no, it really didn't. Or maybe that use of 'except' could be switched to 'but'?
"I'm afraid there's been a little incident in the secretarial pool this morning. But I'm sure your paperwork has only been misled temporarily. Should be 'mislaid'.
There'd be a lot to think about, once he got to the ranch, but he had made his decision, and now all was left was to wait for further data. Needs a 'that' between 'and now all' and 'was left was to wait'.
Coyotes. Motherfucking coyotes.
Mulvaner'd probably been ordered to make a report on them.
I thought his name was Lugvaner?
Abrams didn't comment, just kept going with the spiel; Extraneous 's' on the doctor's name.
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In addition to really liking the characters you've given us so far, I'm pretty curious about Keller's probability shifting and what Thauma 3 means, so you've got a general hook with the story and a specific hook about that lovely little detail. That's pretty neat, and I can't wait for more.
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The probability thing wasn't supposed to be a huge thing but then Keller kinda grabbed it as a "we need to demonstrate this is a non-mundane 'verse!" and kinda ran with it, and now I have no clue what he'll do with that but he's not ready to stop toying with it. I do know roughly how it works though, so hopefully the worldbuilding won't seem wobbly.
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oh my. I'm not to the selling it point yet, but thank you very much for saying so. Now if the rest of the story will work like this...
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I'm a bit fuzzy on the pronunciation of his name though... Aren't teer and tear pronounced the same? Or is one tear like the things that come out of your eyes and the other tear as in "tear this apart"?
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and yes more to come eventually! i hope! i mean there's more written already, i'm just being mean and lazy and not posting yet, but after that i dunno. i've got plot stuff to figure out first. might take a bit. .__.
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If it makes you feel better, you type it better than most people in America speak it.
I think it might be pronounced teer, as in tears in your eyes, because that makes the most sense. Not quite sure how you could make that work without using an analogy though. ^^; sorry.
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Different dynamics are all the fun of having multiple characters! What's the point otherwise. D;
thankies~
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But yes, VERY SHINY OFIC. (and I'm not picking up any trace of G-boys at all. Also I'm loving the Serrano + Tyr!!)
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Am glad you're enjoying it! Also yay for no gboys showing through. (I can still see them, but I know the infrastructure, so.)
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