Work Text:
Screen: To observe, identify, and report information on threats. Only fight in self-protection.
Escort: To ACCOMPANY and PROTECT.
Japanese-Occupied Mengjiang
46.437553, 118.044162
0930 17-MAR-1937
The words above are outlined and underlined in the tiny, tight, precise cipher the Philosophers taught you when you were a girl. Outwardly, the purpose is two-fold: to conceal information, and to identify yourself to an ally.
Inwardly, it reminds you what you're doing here. Here, in the desiccated badlands of Mengjiang; pocked with weathered stones, wizened with sand wrinkles; ancient, barren, full of Mongols. Pressed flat to the ground amidst bleached grass to listen and feel for vehicles while one half of your mission task verbs dozes on the bank of a salt gully, muttering to the dead.
If you stare at him you'll lose yourself in the way he blends into the landscape: the faded grey of the sky, the off-white of the stones and their sharp contours.
You close your eyes. You have five gallons of fuel left between you. Two gallons of water. He has two 7-round .380 ACP magazines for his Beretta M1934. You have six 8-round .30-06 clips for your M1, three 7-round .45 ACP magazines for your M1911A1. Assuming the same gradient ratio you'll be able to travel another hundred miles without resupply, give or take 10. The water will last four days if you ration it. Given your hit percentages you'll be able to neutralize 35-40 enemy combatants. He'll be effective against--
"He was lost. Separated from the rest." The wind carries his hushed voice to you along with the rustle of the grass. "He wandered for days here, thinking he could drink the water. He didn't know. His whole body burned with thirst, and to him it seemed like blue Volga in spring, calling him. Sweetly. He remembered his grandmother warning him about rusalka before he fell."
You'd rather drown with a pretty girl than die of dehydration, personally, but his solemn bearing forestalls your crass commentary. For all it soothes the nerves of many of his other comrades, he doesn't appreciate gallows humour. Perhaps you wouldn't either if you could see the things he sees. You don't know what to say, so you hand him glasses back in silence, while he blinks to adjust to the world of the living.
You offer him your shoulder up out of the small ravine. You stand with his boot still on it so that he doesn't have to jump for the lip. While he crawls toward your motorcycles you kick over the salt-preserved corpse you found face down in the shallow, bitter stream. Everything he carried is too corroded to be salvagable.
You scramble up the rocks and swing yourself over the edge. He's learned that you don't need an outstretched hand. He waits for you with his eyes on the horizon, lost in his own thoughts.
"So... they kept going north?" you ask. He nods.
You're staring at him again.
You make camp as soon as the sun goes down. You'll be spotted from twenty miles away if you use the headlights; riding a motorcycle offroad in the dark is an easy bake recipe for a broken neck. The sheltered leeward side of a boulder in a slight depression; if you let him have a cook fire the food'll taste better and you'll have coffee. You do a quick patrol around the area to ensure you aren't too visible while he prepares both.
The firelight casts shadows under his high cheekbones. Along the curve of his throat.
When they first told you they were adding a Russian mystic to your cadre of unusual resources, you envisioned Rasuptin: towering, bearded, and wild-eyed. Then you chided yourself for childish fancy; if anything, these days, he would be a stout scowling socialist. Farm-bred and factory-trained, hungry or paunchy with no in-between, most likely bald.
When this slender pale beauty entered the room you'd walked right into a chair. Grunted something unintelligible he understood to be hello.
It's still difficult to come up with something to say around him. You'd thought, when this mission had first been assigned, that this would be your chance to get to know him. The two of you alone, under the open sky--scratch that, better to bring a tent with his frail constitution--with no one around for miles. But all you can think to ask is what he must be utterly weary of explaining: what it's like to speak to the dead.
He explains it to you anyhow, patiently. The way they seep into his porous consciousness. He sounds as if he doesn't expect to be believed, but why wouldn't you? The Philosophers would have tested him. Asked him for information he could glean no other way. The details would've been immaterial to them; he could've described anything from a somber procession to the pearly gates to a jazz band full of skeletons - nobody else'd have any way of knowing.
Instead he describes sinking, falling; swept under by slow currents. Samsara. A boy who found solace in cemeteries and grave pits; heard whispered voices in trenches and whispered back.
Between his quiet words and the three hours you've slept each night you feel the water close in over your own head, dust-dry and coffee-scented.
"...Joy?"
The fire crackles. You blink, rapidly. "Hm?"
"When did you first know this was your calling?" He doesn't usually look at you when he speaks; his eyes brush along your shoulders and jaw.
Yours follow the long, elegant lines of his hands. "My calling? That's one way to put it, I guess." You stretch; flex your toes. You're airing your bare feet out near the fire, downwind of him. Laundry has not been a priority; you won't make the same mistake the poor Soviet did and use bad water.
"When I was a kid I got into a lot of fights." You shrug. Silly childish things: rocks thrown, hair pulled. Sniping at the oversized, graceless girl lumbering so awkwardly among the polished young daughters of dictators, presidents, and kings. "I hardly ever started them, but I always finished them. So my father told me: if you like brawling so much, you could at least put to good use. He hired a man to teach me how to box, and wrestle. I came home the first day so sore I could hardly move, black and blue down to my toes."
"He asked me: 'now, sweetheart, what did you learn?'" You grin. "I had no idea - it was the most fun I'd ever had in my life. I begged him to bring that man back again."
"He was trying to teach you not to be a bully," your companion observes mildly.
"I know that now."
The silence resumes where you left it. After a time he peels out of his outer clothes and you watch the sky, politely. The stars are silver-white; endless. In your mind's eye they stretch on and on impossibly across a field of green in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, your hand in your father's as you walk amongst them. The bruises had faded by then. Idly, his thumb touches the scabs on your knuckles. He lists names that count in the hundreds - only the ones he knew, personally. Never forget. Never again.
"Joy..."
"Hm?"
"You're not a boxer."
Mongolian Border
46.714891, 118.268388
0600 18-MAR-1937
You'd kill a man for another ten minutes of sleep, but the distant engines that have awoken you promise you something you need much more. No more than two or three by the sounds of them. Feasible. You rub the grit out of your eyes and grab your rifle. They'll hear you coming if you approach on the bike; the only tactical decision you have to make is whether or not you do this solo.
"We're attacking them?" Sorrow asks with his brow creased upward; he knows the answer. Otherwise he would've woken you up when he heard them.
"We don't, we die." It's much simpler than to say 'if we don't, I'd have to leave you here in order to survive, which I won't, so yes, we'll die.' Even letting him sleep through the night and take evening and morning watches while you nap fitfully he looks drawn and weary. You were right to assume that on foot or on horseback this would have proved impossible. He needs the bikes; besides, the bikes have reduced the time required for this mission from weeks or possibly months to days.
But the bikes need fuel.
You slam a fresh bloc clip through the top of your M1 and sling it. If he's going to hesitate, you don't need him.
"Pack up."
You assume he'll obey; it doesn't really matter if he does or not. You can strike the tent and stow your gear in a fraction the time he can. That's not why he's mission critical. This is simply more...
Efficient. For you to sprint through the rifts between dunes until you have line of sight. Then to crawl on your stomach beneath theirs with the rifle held in your upward palms to the best vantage point: a cliff above the dry riverbed the two Japanese vehicles are using for a road. There's a single stone half the size of your body for cover, but it's a terrible angle for them and a great one for you. You lay perfectly still; the vibrations through the earth threaten to lull you to sleep. A fringe-toed lizard climbs to the top of the stone to see what you're looking at.
Through your scope you see one jeep and one truck. Lucky for you it looks like cargo rather than troop transport. Just where are they going? The invasion - if it happens, which you'd give a snowball's chance in Antarctica right about now - will be toward the south. Beijing and Shanghai. The land up here is worthless.
The driver of the jeep looks like he's got lice from the way he keeps scratching his head. His passenger is snoring open-mouthed. Will he wake up when he hits the water the Sorrow describes, or will he doze through his own death?
That's a pointless, distracting thought. A better one occurs to you: their small convoy is driving with good discipline now - if one of them swerves or slams on the brakes, the other will be able to clear it - but if you wait until they hit the bend you're perched above, the jeep'll slow, and if they're as tired as you are that distance will close.
It's a trickier shot than far out at a mostly level plane, but no risk, no reward.
You inch out to the rim at the last possible minute to avoid detection; pull your legs up under you because you're firing downard. Wait, wait, let the reticle lead the shot. Exhale.
CRACK.
Inhale. It's unsubtle; you were aiming for a headshot but the bullet enters through his shoulder instead - from the way he spasms violently between the seat and wheel, it probably bounces around through the soft organs beneath his ribcage before finding a bone in which to lodge.
The skidding tires and shearing metal as the truck hits the jeep is even less subtle. Tough to say if the passenger wakes up before his neck breaks against the rocks he's flung into or not.
The driver of the truck is shouting something in Japanese to his comrades. His own passenger thinks to go for his rifle first. Good instincts. You manage the headshot this time; cracked glass, blood spray across the windshield. The driver drops beneath the vehicle, out of sight. Better instincts.
Now this gets interesting. You sling your rifle again; you'll circle around to flank--
"There are two in the back."
If you could mistake his voice for anyone else's you might have struck him. You glance over your shoulder instead; Sorrow is behind you, laid flat on the sand with his eyes unfocused.
Well, that changes your entire battle plan.
"They'll really sell out their comrades just like that, huh," you ask on the way back to the camp he hasn't struck. Something about that doesn't sit well with you. He's already told you that languages, flags, and borders don't matter to the dead - and these are largely conscripts to be sure - but what about their brothers-in-arms? Are they that desperate to for attention? Striving for purpose?
Or do they seek to drag the others under water with them?
"It isn't like that," he pants, struggling to keep pace with you; a tank of gasoline sloshes in his trembling arms. "I'm no longer an enemy."
You take it from him before he collapses, add it to the two you carry; your mouth still stings faintly from the fumes you inhaled when you siphoned it out. "Yes you are."
"There are no more enemies there. No more sides. No missions or consequences." He's sweating; he unsticks his soaked shirt from his perfectly taut chest. You stare forward. He'll be cold tonight.
"What about the ones who still want China whole?" His revelation that some spirits did take a side contradicted everything that came before so thoroughly you didn't know what to make of it. Are they inhuman, as he suggests, or simply stronger-willed than the others?
He doesn't answer you. You wonder if he has one. Instead, he asks, "You're worried that if you died, you would betray your mission? Or betray me?"
You snort. "Sorrow, if I died out here, you'd be toast."
In the end you had to make several trips. The convoy was well-supplied, and now you are. You have enough fuel and water to make it all the way through the Gobi desert, if need be. To the scant permanent settlements to the north; restocking there, and all the way into Siberia, though how they could have passed the railroad you can't begin to guess.
"Sorrow, where were they going?" You've let him stoke the fire high tonight. It's bright enough to continue work on the hybrid rifle-carbine-handgun you've been fiddling with for the past few months. In your imagination it's more than a short-barreled sub-machine gun, even if that's exactly what it looks like right now. Give it time.
It gives your hands something to do, anyway. Reminds of you of home; rows upon rows of gun racks your father bought for you before the Philosophers had seized it, and him.
"The convoy had never seen any signs of them," he replies quizzically. Of course they hadn't; the missing Soviet expeditionary brigade you'd been sent to track passed through here over a year ago. That was the whole point of his being here: no - ordinary - person could follow them now.
"No, I mean the convoy." Busy hands set the mind free. An idea percolates there, hazy with exhaustion, half-formed. An ambition to see this mission to succeed on all parameters, to help Sun's loyal children and the wayward ones against outsiders who took them for easy prey.
"North." This child of Vladmir's sits as close to the fire as he can be without being in it. You'll have to make sure he eats. "Why?"
"I think I know what happened to our Soviets." After their long flight and unexpected victories in skirmishes along the way, it seems a shame, but--
"You think the Japanese finally caught up with them?" He, too, seems to find that regrettable - or perhaps it's that they died at all. You can never tell.
"No, I think what's up north did."
"The Japanese...?"
"The desert."
A soundless, "Oh," and he goes back to staring at your hands while you work. He doesn't have a project of his own. And when he'd asked you why you didn't take the Japanese ammunition as well as their water and gasoline, you'd stroked you chin for a good half-minute, and determined that you won't be talking shop with him any time soon.
"We'll keep following their trail until we get some kind of confirmation, then exfiltrate." You to Vladivostok, him to Moscow. Another week or so until you're home.
He's not interested in discussing mission plans or logistics with you, either. You get the impression, from the way he looks at your maps, as if they were a difficult puzzle or an intriguing and complex modern art piece, that he can't read them either. Hell, they really did pluck him off a farm and toss him out into no man's land with a commando. Who but the Philosophers. All-knowing, all-seeing, except where they weren't; blind-sided by the Japs and Krauts.
"What made you want to fight alone?" He has his arms wrapped around his knees.
"I don't seem very alone to me." You offer him a smile.
"I mean, why not fight as part of a company? As one of many troops? As a leader?"
Does he really not know? "What, as part of the Women's Auxillary, driving cars and typing orders?" Mind you, he's hardly acknowledged your sex since you've known him. No, that's not entirely fair; your father's influence has bought you all kinds of exceptions in the US Army. You've trained with them. It's more your age they take issue with. Though that has never mattered to your current commanders. "I tried to do an exercise with the Royal Marines, once." Of the kinds of warfare you'd envisioned as a young girl, their operations came the closest. "The captain in charge refused. As an officer and gentleman, under no circumstances would his 'lads' be responsible for putting me in danger."
"What did you say?"
"Nothing." You take a sip of coffee. "I left a few hours before them and completed the objective by myself."
"Ah." He returns your smile as if he expected that answer.
The temperature plunges so low that night that snowflakes linger on the sand long minutes before the heat of your fire melts them. You watch him shiver in his sleeping bag. You're cold yourself and lack of sleep only heightens that raw feeling.
You spend the night curled around him through a layer of fabric. If you squeezed too hard it feels as though he'd break.
Khalkhgol, Mongolia
47.138626, 119.232337
2330 19-MAR-1937
You have no excuses. The failure of this mission was your fault.
The contented spirit of a blind nomad directed you to what the convoy was to supply: a ratio station 50 miles outside territory known to be occupied by the Japanese. They would have code books inside; ciphers. Perhaps orders. Perhaps intelligence on Soviet troop movements not yet relayed to their HQ. So many possibilities. So many maps to be redrawn. So much more worthwhile than chasing Red ghosts through badlands.
And high on all the possibilities having eyes on the inside of everyone you killed could offer, you'd taken him with you. At your side you were certain you could protect him. You hadn't even bothered scout the place - what need for reconnaissance when a single corpse would tell you all you wanted to know?
So the fact that it had thirty men, not five or six, took you by surprise. No matter: you no longer needed their gasoline. A single magnificently placed shot blew the whole thing open; a fireball through tight concrete corridors. You'd picked off seared stragglers mercifully.
And then the patrol you'd missed out of stupidity, overconfidence, and lack of caution had destroyed your motorcycles.
You'd been so angry you'd kicked him, which surprised him as much as you. He'd done exactly what you told him to do. You could've easily cracked his ribs with that; he gasps and spits from having the air knocked out of him as much as breaching the surface of the land of the living.
You cook him dinner that night by way of unspoken apology. That was unworthy of you. Spend the night salvaging the radio and mast to give him hope. It's worth a shot. You still have that intelligence. It's the rest of the mission you've failed.
He won't survive the journey out of here on foot, and he knows it. Depending on the weather and the water, even you might not. You have contingencies, in case your calls go unanswered: that nomad died days ago, Sorrow said. Perhaps they haven't moved on. Even if they had they would have had a funeral for her. They can't have gone far. Twenty, thirty miles at most.
To him that might as well be two hundred.
At least he has a real bed. Blankets, pillows - only a little charred. The tent only cut the wind; the concrete bunker blocks it out entirely. He does not seem cheered by this fact. He draws his knees up as if he's still cold. You pretend he is. Make him a cup of sencha out of the least bloody packet.
You'll wait until morning, you decide. If there's no answer you'll leave him here to see if you can't find supplies. He's the one reassuring the Japanese that all is well. You won't be able to protect him, but... well, perhaps they would have shot him if you'd left him with the bikes, too. You're only compounding your mistakes.
He utters a noise of protest when you rise to leave, quietly.
So you sprawl out on the floor a few feet away instead. Eyes on the night sky. Make to light the cigar you kept to celebrate this mission's success; after the third strike he takes the lighter from you. Gets a flame in one.
"Thanks," you murmur contentedly, grateful for nicotine. It takes the edge off.
Tears spill over his cheeks. You want to touch them. You force yourself to look at the stars.
He admits that he's afraid to die.
It confirms what you'd suspected: that for all his euphemisms and elegant turns of phrase, it really is less like fading away and more like drowning. You'd figured it was ugly and hard; enough to leave something ephemeral and delicate like him trembling in the dark.
Not you. If that's how it is, that's how it'll be. You'll forge onward. There no point worrying about what-ifs, and could-have-beens. Only is and could-bes; the aim of making the latter into the former. Why fear it?
It's only when he admits to what he regrets that you realize you're just as much a coward. Maybe more. And you laugh.
"I'm a virgin."
You do what you should have done weeks ago. The first day you met. You cup his beautiful face and you kiss him.
He's hesitant; shy. Tastes like bitter green tea and salty tears while you taste like cigar smoke and gasoline. He almost breaks it, chastely - you tilt your face so that you can seal your lips around his. Touch his soft tongue with yours and draw it into your own mouth.
His hands lay lightly on your shoulders until you grasp them and push them up under your shirt. You wore your nice silk bra for him out of an idle fancy that you might get laid on this trip; seems ludicrous now, stained with sweat and worse. So are your breasts, but from the way he gasps and shifts he certainly doesn't mind.
Weeks of futile yearning, of wasted time, of nervously wondering if he'd even be interested. He's so, so gentle and his skin is impossibly smooth under your calloused fingertips. You stroke up the inside of the lean thighs you admired so long, squeeze the waist you longed to put your arm around, press your lips deeply into the hollow of a once perfectly white throat stained with grime.
You push him down onto his back; rather, he gives out beneath your weight when you lean forward. You hold the back of his head so it doesn't hit the ground.
When you feel his cock rise against your stomach all other thoughts flee from your mind. That emptiness you spoke so boldly about - you've attained it.
There's nothing here except him. You are nowhere but here. There is nothing to see but his eyes gone black as oil with pleasure when you draw his cock into you. No sensation but that; hot and pulsing and as you rock forward you clench to squeeze it, to give as much warmth as you take.
Nothing matters save the sound of his sighs and his touch outside and inside you. You wish it could go on forever.
It won't. And that pricks moisture under your eyelids, just as soon swallowed by sweat and darkness.
You fall asleep together. He lays wrapped up in your arms; the rise and fall of his chest the only thing in the world, for as long as you have it.
The rest of the world returns with a boot to the chest from a Japanese infantryman. It's harder than the one you gave the Sorrow; you wheeze, hack, catch a glimpse into the scorched courtyard and realize that they have a vehicle--
The enemy soldier lowers his Nambu pistol toward your skull and you lunge without hesitation. Twist his forearm between both of your hands to the breaking point faster than he can scream. The man behind him has an Arisaka rifle with a bayonet; you hurl the man you hold right into him, bowling them both over.
Sorrow is still unbundling himself from his blankets when you rack the pistol while aiming; no time to see if it's been cocked, you shoot them both twice in the head. You have the advantage of surprise, and you plan to press it.
Shots fired raise the alarm among the rest. "Find cover," you hiss to Sorrow a second before a ricochet grazes his hairline.
No good. You need to draw fire. There are at least ten in the courtyard and at most three cartridges left in the pistol. You snag the Arisaka and roll into the adjoining room. It works.
Six of them are dead through the window slit before they realize you don't just plan to lay covering fire. They all will be before you run out of bullets. No trick shots and shortcuts: you are methodical; a machine oiled with thousands of hours of practice.
The only good cover is the bunker. If the survivors make for the bunker you'll go room to room. You have the bayonet if it all comes down to it. You have the Sorrow calling targets for you - a fact your conscious mind only just now registers. You will win. You will kill them all. You will survive this. You will--
Go ashen with horror when one of them lobs a grenade far too well-cooked to hurl back at him through the window slit.
You use the beat count you have before it fragments to hurl yourself into the depression they use as a bath. The blast bashes your head against the concrete; the ringing in your ears is a siren, wailing, unceasing.
Louder than the roar of concrete as the whole bunker starts to collapse.
For a precious few minutes you had weapons, hope; now all you have is the single breath you took before blocks crushed you to the floor, unyielding tons of them, and the urge to cough for all the dust and sand.
Blind, deaf, plunged into darkness.
The Sorrow spoke of the ones who never saw it coming. That won't be you. You'll suffocate first. Your chest is already heaving with the need to breathe. To suck in sand. That'll make it quicker.
It hurts worse than you thought it would, dying. When will it get faint, distant like he promised? You're choking and your ribcage is spasming and your head throbs like it's still being kicked against the floor.
You'd struggle but there's no point. You already know - in great detail - what will happen. You've trained to hold your breath; you can do so for five minutes on a good day. Then lack of air will make you lose consciousness. Then you'll die.
And then you'll slip under the water. Just like he said. Your whole life meaningless. Your mission over - will he be there? You hope so. You understand, at last: it's not a betrayal because it won't matter to him anymore, either.
In the end you were just a boy and a girl who couldn't admit their feelings until it was too late. Everything you strove for come to nothing. As it was always going to. Arduously trained flesh turned to dust. As it does for everyone. No one can, or will, help you.
Is it any wonder he was so delicate, faced with that truth? The transience of life, as known to a boy who haunted grave--
--pits. Who felt the awfulness, the horror, the agony of countless deaths by war. While you're coming undone under the relentless misery and terror of your own. Who continued to do so willingly for what he believed in. Even if it meant following a pitiless man-killer across a godforsaken desert.
The Sorrow isn't fleeting, or fragile. He stares into the abyss and withstands it every day of his life.
He lets it wash over him and still breaks the surface of the water.
You exhale.
It creates the inch of space you need now that the rubble has settled to claw an arm free. To tear at the concrete strangling you. You won't go down like this; you won't drown, you won't drift away. You will bury yourself and your will into the landscape like the ghosts he spoke to who hadn't forgotten who they were. What their purpose was. You will sear it into the earth. Never again. Never forget.
You rip your fingernails clean off; scrape the skin off your knees and half of your face. You scream breathlessly as you heave the last piece upward.
Up into the grey light of dawn.