Jax shows Emerett the room. Dark, dull, lit by a few wall mounted torches. A wardrobe, a cabinet. Two beds separated by a long table with two drawers. One bed is covered in furs with the sheets thrown wildly and the other is completely neat. One side of the table supports a silver flask, a knife, a black ashtray, a small book, and a pile of jewelry. The other is completely empty. He guesses the empty side is his.
Jax tells him which bed is his (he had guessed correctly) and that he should go ask Orrian for clothes, they keep some for newcomers to take if they don’t have their own, which they usually don’t.
He complies, walking out of the room and down the stone-lined hall. Orrian, sitting in a chair by the door to the stairs. He asks him about the clothes, and he leads him to a closet room at the end of the hall and tells him to take what he wants. He gives him no specific number but he assumes he doesn’t want him to take much. Two shirts, two pairs of pants, a jacket, and a pair of black knee-high combat boots, like the kind they wore in the army. Thank you, no problem, and he’s back to the room, sorting the clothes in the wardrobe.
—
That night, Emerett goes to bed alone for the first time in his life. No army bunkmates, Jax nowhere to be seen. He had eaten with him but he’d gone from the bar (which apparently served food at meal times) to the shelter with the rest of the roomers and Jax had gone elsewhere, out into the cold night. The room was quiet, dark, lonely. He never thought he would miss his bunkmates, or anything about the army for that matter, but he doesn’t like the silence. He’s scared he might dream.
—
He does, he dreams of sheep, but he doesn’t remember when he wakes up. No horn to wake up to either, they’re underground so no sun, Jax is still asleep so no chatter or clatter or shuffling boots. He only wakes up because his eyes know when to open. He had gotten into the habit of waking up before the horn anyway, about 30 seconds, right down to it.
He sits up in bed and looks around the pitch black room, calibrating his eyes to the dark. He doesn’t really know what to do. No drills to go to, no training or conditioning, he doesn’t even know if the bar serves breakfast. He doesn’t want to wake Jax by lighting the torches, and he doesn’t know where the matches are anyway, so he just sits there for a bit, adjusting to the thought of his new life. No drills, no training, no conditioning, maybe no breakfast, right. Weird roommate. He’s an animal hybrid, he knew a couple in the army, with claws and tails and furry ears. But the ones he knew were a little more… refined. They looked more like real hybrids, Jax looks like a child’s attempt at drawing a hybrid. A large man, tall and muscular, with the ears of a wolf pasted on top of his long, messy hair and a whole entire tail behind him, bits and pieces haphazardly thrown together like a science experiment. Claws and padded fingers, thick, dark body hair. He looks over to his bed and wonders. It’s entirely possible to make something like him, but he’d never seen it before. He’d never seen most things before. He’d never seen piercings like his before, symmetrical on the mouth, two silver balls on either sides of the top lip, two beside either corner, and one in the very middle of his bottom lip, a ball on the lip and a black, teardrop charm below it. Three silver cuffs on either side of his wolfish ears, but those could just be regular jewelry. The army pierced their right ears for number tags, but never anything else. They removed his tag when they sent him to the executioner, but they kept the ring in, small and silver. He had forgotten it was there.
After a few minutes, he figures he should probably do something, so he gets out of bed and puts on some of the clothes he acquired yesterday; a long black tank top and a pair of moss green pants, loose but cinched at the ankle, with cargo pockets, the most familiar thing he could find. The men in the army didn’t normally wear shoes, but everybody he’s seen so far has worn them, so he laced up the boots before he left.
Shutting the door slowly behind him, careful not to make any noise, he walks out into the hall and drags his fingers across the stone wall. It’s rough and cold, and he likes how it makes his fingers rise and drop and drop and rise.
“Breakfast’s out in the bar,” he hears from in front of him. Orrian, in his chair like last time, writing something in his notebook.
“Oh,” he rasps, startled and sleepy-voiced, “Thank you.”
Orrian doesn’t respond, he just raises his hand and unlocks the door. Emerett pushes it open and walks up the dank staircase, hearing the lock slide back again not a second after he’s closed the door. This staircase is too steep, he thinks as he climbs, and it smells like rain. He reaches the top and hesitates a minute. He’s nervous like he always was before tests in the army, or in the cafeteria when they got a new batch of soldiers, or right before they brought him out to the middle of the courtyard. He pushes the door open and steps into the bar.
It’s full of people, shelter dwellers and otherwise, grouped together in tables and floating around the bar. The air was filled with fragrant smoke like last night and people slid through it like fish through water, carrying mugs of beer and water and bowls of thick stew very similar to the kind they ate in the army, grains and vegetables and what seems to be fish. Dazed, he walks up to the bar on the balls of his feet, weaving swiftly through the people like a shadow. Behind it is the woman he met yesterday. She has colorful flowers tucked in her thick curly hair and she’s rushing from one side of the bar to the other, trading bowls and mugs and ladles and bottles between her hands and passing them to various people and locations, ladle under the bar (presumably to a pot of stew) to bowl, bowl to person, bottle to mug, mug to person, bowl from person, bowl under the bar. It’s like a dance, graceful and swift, with learned steps and deep troughs of memory to follow. It takes her a while to notice him, sitting sheepishly on a stool with his hands in his lap.
“Breakfast?” She says, startling him out of his daze.
“Please.”
The dance resumes, ladle to pot to bowl to Emerett. He thanks her, but she’s already on the other side of the bar. He gets up and looks through the smoke for a table. There are no empty ones left, so he tries to find one of the people he met yesterday at dinner. The first one he finds is another animal hybrid, a tiger, named Heliote. She’s sitting at a small three-seater table on her own, with an empty bowl, a half-empty mug of beer, and a cigarette in a wooden holder. He walks over to her table, shuffling his feet a little bit.
“Can I sit here?”
She nods at one of the empty chairs. “We met at dinner, right? Emerett?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from the army too,” she says, breathing out a puff of smoke, “I didn’t get a chance to say it last night. Same batch as Jax.”
Right, she’s the same kind of hybrid as him, he thinks. Mosaic-ish. Tiger parts pasted onto her like costume pieces, stripes on her face and arms like face paint. He could’ve guessed they were grown from the same lab design, but the army is new information.
“Jax was in the army?” Emerett asks, furrowing his eyebrows.
“He didn’t tell you?” She furrows her eyebrows right back. They’re thick and black, in contrast to her fiery orange hair.
“No.”
“He doesn’t really like talking about it, I guess,” she says, running her hand through her choppy, chin-length hair, “but he told us you were in the army last night, so he can’t get mad at me for telling you he was.”
He did tell them that, and it ticked him off a little bit. He doesn’t want Jax going around telling everybody everything he knows about him, even if the only thing he knows about him is that he was in the army. Bad form. But he was drunk, relatively.
“How are you adjusting?” She takes a drag from her cigarette and puffs it back out to mingle with the smoky air. “To life outside, that is.”
He looks down at his untouched bowl of stew and takes a bite, because he’s hungry or because he wants to buy himself some time to think about his answer he doesn’t know. It’s warm and tastes exactly like the stuff from the army, but with fish in it instead of pork or chicken.
“Okay, I guess.” he responds after swallowing, “This place is pretty similar to the army anyway. I didn’t really know what to expect.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought when I first got here. I thought it would be, I don’t know… dingier. But it’s nice. It’s home.”
He takes another bite of the stew and fails to think of a response. They sit in silence for a minute as he eats, rushed like he always has, not really internalizing the fact that he doesn’t have anything to rush to after breakfast. Heliote’s eyes are an ambery yellow and they shift across the room like lighthouse beams as she alternates her lips between her beer mug and her cigarette.
A click at the side of the room and there’s Jax through the door, wearing a pair of loose black pants, a long jacket tied around his waist, and no shirt, only a stack of silver chains on his chest and rings like earrings through his nipples. More irregular piercings. His wavy hair is loose around his shoulders and it shifts across his chest as he walks to the bar, slow and weary-stepped. He retrieves his breakfast and a mug of water and scans the crowd. His eyes are quick and sharp, and the same amber-yellow color as Heliote’s. He finds them fast and walks over to their table, hooking his foot on the leg of the last available chair and pulling it out haphazardly.
“Morning,” he says as he sits, his voice thick and rough with sleep, tone burgundy red. Emerett hums in response, finishing the last of his stew and sitting awkwardly straight-backed in his chair. He feels his yellow eyes on the side of his head and he looks to the other side, absentmindedly observing a woman at a table to his right.
“How’d you sleep?” Heliote asks, question with a deceptive second head of sarcasm.
Jax chuckles through his nose, a couple of sharp puffs of air. “Fine. How’d you sleep?” Emerett hears his voice a half-notch louder and looks over, eyes widened. Jax is looking at him, pointing at his face with his spoon.
“Oh,” he says, surprised, and not really prepared to contribute to conversation. He was stowed away on some rusty train of thought. “Good, I guess.”
“Weird being alone at night, huh? Or, mostly alone.”
“Yeah.” He thinks of his army bunkmates. On not a small amount of nights he would hear some kind of vocalization from one of the other beds. Nightmares… sex, maybe. It was hard to tell most of the time, unless one of the other beds was empty. “Quiet.”
“Quiet…” Jax whispers in return, elongating the vowels, adding a breathy “ah” sound after the t at the end. This was the end of the conversation.
—
Emerett had a hard time occupying himself in his new home. He gave himself a modest tour of the place, which only took a few minutes since it’s only the tavern (that is the word for it, he was informed) and the shelter hallway, which is extremely uninteresting. Stone walls, stone floor, wooden doors. He doesn’t open any of the doors, assuming that, with the exception of the closet at the end, they all lead to rooms like Jax and his. He was right, except some rooms have more or less beds and there are a few other storage closets. Inconsequential.
He’s too scared to go outside, being an army escapee and therefore a felon. He’s far far from the army base and he doesn’t think anybody would care enough to search for him anyway, but he doesn’t want to risk it. He was running from the law for long enough after escaping the base, two weeks of sneaking through the country, hopping trains and running along the edges of woods and sleeping in alleyways, nearly naked in the winter cold. He got rumors, directions, cold night companionship from other stowaways, but nothing else, having to beg for food with the dogs at the back door of restaurants. He lost a lot of weight and a lot of moxie those two weeks. Thinking of this, he finds himself laying on the –his– bed in the –his– room. Like waking up from a dream, goosebumped.
He’s never had a room before. He went straight from the growth lab to the barracks. He gets up from the bed and inspects the place. The walls and floor are stone like the hallway, and everything else is made of the same kind of wood. It’s exceedingly plain and a little bit depressing. He finds his hands on the cabinet doors, opening them and inspecting the contents. Not much of interest; some books, some potions, a couple skins of wine. A couple knives, one large and machete-esque, with sigils engraved on the base of the blade. He catches a glint of bright silver out of the corner of his eye and it leads him to a black wooden box on the bottom shelf, with intricately carved silver caps on the corners. He crouches down and inspects it. Dull on the sides, the paint worn off. He presses his fingers to the most worn areas and opens the lid.
Inside is paper, a stack of it, worn and stained. He looks quick over his shoulder and unfolds the topmost sheet. A wanted poster, with Jax’s face in the middle. He looks younger, and his hair is considerably shorter, cut almost exactly like Emerett’s. The cut they have in the army, early stage soldiers, or late stage trainees. A few months before they’re ready for battle. His eyes are dull and his mouth is set. So they do search for army escapees. This unsettles him. A wanted poster? Are there posters of him out there? He unfolds the next paper, burrowing himself deeper.
A newspaper, this one. The text is considerably faded, but he can make out the headline. Extremely volatile soldiers escaped from army base, several army officials dead in horrific massacre.
The box is closed again. The papers are folded and back in their nest. Emerett is sitting back on his bed. Extremely volatile soldiers escaped from army base. Was that Jax? Extremely volatile? Massacre? Murderer? His thoughts race panting by like wild horses running from a fire in the fields. There are other reasons one might keep a newspaper. Maybe that was a friend’s escape, or maybe he just collects news from the army base. Maybe he knew one of the dead guards. Maybe he is an extremely volatile escaped soldier. It doesn’t matter anyway, he thinks, it doesn’t matter. If he had finished army training he would’ve killed countless enemy soldiers on the field, what’s the difference? He lays back on the bed. What’s the difference? He doesn’t know. Jax doesn’t seem dangerous. He closes his eyes. What’s the difference? What’s the difference?
Deep in the back of his head there is a pulsing, bloody mass that reaches its void-dark tendrils out to the front of his head, like ravines in his mind, like ghostly shadows, to answer: They do not matter. The guards matter, the country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. The shadow tendrils flash in front of his head, playing a puppet show he’s seen countless times before; a faceless head being blown apart, a nameless leg-stump squirting out blood, a heartless chest being stabbed and slashed sword and metal and blood on the dusty ground. The voice he heard his entire maturation, countless unconscious nights unremembered in the lab, listening to the voice while his body floats in the milky growth liquid and his mind develops in his head. They do not matter. The country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. They do not matter. They have no names, they have no hearts, they do not matter. Run, slash, stab, shoot. The country matters, we matter, nothing else matters. The country matters we matter nothing else matters. Thecountrymatterswematternothingelsematters.
—
He eats dinner again that night with Jax and Heliote. He avoids his eyes, he doesn’t talk much.
—
Nighttime, in the room, Jax takes the silver chains off his neck one by one.
“How you like it here?” he asks, dropping the chains haphazardly on the bedside table. The end of one catches on the corner of the ashtray.
“Alright,” Emerett picks absentmindedly at his fingernail beds as he answers, halfhearted in all respects, “I guess.”
“You got any questions? Or, you know…” The end of his sentence trails off with no apparent destination.
Emerett’s brows dig themselves further into the middle of his forehead. How did you escape the army? Have you ever killed a man? Who are you?
“What do you do all the time here?”
Jax raises his eyebrows and thinks for a second. “Drink,” –pause– “read, hunt. A lot of people work. Sometimes we go out to tell people about the shelter, poor people and… stuff. You can come if you want.”
Emerett considers this. He can’t stay curled up in the shelter forever.
“Sure.”
This drawing is from a while later in the story but I figured I’d put it here as visual aid. Also the pages are folding so it looks warped just ignore that ❤️
