Swordstory, ch. 3

[jesrosewater]

 Alright, one more cross-post before we're current! This chapter is alright, but I wrote it at different times so the pacing seems off to me. Maybe it's just me, because I wrote it and I know things y'all don't. Let's hope the cut actually works this time!!

Here's chapter one.
And here is chapter two.

Warning: In this part is some cultural transphobia, and also thoughts of dead bodies. No real dead bodies. We're just thinking about them.

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He said that we should talk, but it didn’t happen immediately. Neither of us knew where to start, so we just kinda sat, looking at each other or not when that became too awkward. The gentle current lapping little waves at the side of the boat. That lapping soon felt to me like churning, stirring in my gut as I thought about the consequences of what I’d just done.

Rafe piped up first. “So… soulmates, huh?”

“Yes. It seems so. Wait-” I pulled out my dagger again, and handed it to him handle-first. “Maybe it was a mistake. Try to stab me again. To make sure.”
He quirked a curious eyebrow, but shrugged, willing to at least try it. Rafe took my knife, then my hand, pulling my arm towards him. The blade slipped through the bones that framed my wrist, but with no pain or blood. Damn it. I held my hand out for the knife, and he handed it to me, and I tried slashing across his palm. Nothing. That was pretty definitive proof, if there was any.

“This is a pretty funny cosmic joke, is it not? Two soldiers made for killing, bonded incapable of killing each other.” I sighed, closing my heavy eyes. “How do you feel about all this?”

He drew away from me, back to where he’d been seated before. Not too distant, the boat wasn’t that huge. “Well… are we supposed to be in love? We’re soulmates, aren’t we?”
I shrugged widely. “I do not know. I am certainly not in love with you - no offense, but less than an hour ago we were trying to kill each other.”

Rafe huffed a big sigh of relief, posture relaxing like he’d been a tightly-wound sprung finally let go. “Good, good, I’m glad we’re on the same page about that. I’m not in love with you either. I mean, I don’t even know your name.”

He gave me a meaningful look, and I met his gaze with a hint of bemusement. No, if he was going to ask like that, I’d let him sweat a bit longer. “I agree. If the universe decided to have us be in love at first sight, I think I would have some consent issues with that. I would need much more time.”

“Yeah, we’re on the same level here. Besides, I’ve got a girl back home anyways, so…”

“Not a wife?” I asked, surprised. Which was, admittedly, a bit rude of me. But my surprise was from the level of relationship he implied - usually, if someone likes a girl enough to call them ‘my girl back home’, they like her enough to get hitched. Quick weddings were immensely common, though less romantic. It helped when everyone was on the edge of death daily and didn’t know if they’d be capable of having a wedding the next day.
Rafe shook his head. “In my country, it’s entirely the woman’s choice when to get married. I asked her before I shipped out, but she didn’t want to be a widow so young. Which I completely understand. I still love her a lot.” He frowns, starting to look troubled. “I’m… probably never going to see her again, am I?”

There was silence for a while, because I had no idea what to tell him. “You might. Who knows where this might take us. I swear, I won’t keep you from her - but the consequences for this might. …I am sorry. I am the one who pulled you away. I should have thought, rather than just running.”

“No, no - it’s fine. If I was you, I would’ve wanted to run as well. What’s the consequence for defection in your country?”

“Death.”

“Yeesh. Yeah, alright.”

I nodded, and we bobbed along the stream for a while. The water here was fairly clear still, I could see little fish swimming through the rocks and water weeds. Rafe seemed not to know what to add, but he didn’t realize he didn’t need to add anything.

“So - okay, alright. How do I ask this. Uh… what are you?”

I had been staring at the water, and his question snapped me out of it like having a boot thrown at my head. “What? I’m… what am I? A. A human? Or… a soldier? Do you want to know my rank?”
“No, no…” He waved his hands, banishing the previous question. “I dunno how to word it. I just can’t get a handle on you, like… the way you look is confusing. I get that sometimes with people from your side, actually - I can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl.”

Oh. Oh! I started to laugh. “That’s right! I forgot, your country is still weird about that 'gender’ thing. What a thing to be hung up on! At a time like this. I can not even conceive of worrying about gender. Well, I am not a boy or a girl. I am uranian.”

He gave me this hilarious look, mouth agape like I had descended from the sky and claimed to be from the moon. “What… what is uranian.”

You would think that, since our countries were side by side and always interacting, some of our cultures might transfer over. That seemed to not be so. “In my country, there are three gender categories - many genders, but three eaves to stand under in this thunderstorm that is life. There is dionin, bursche, and uranian. I am not quite sure what correlation these might have in your country’s genders. But as for me, the pronoun my comrades recognize for me is xe. As in, 'Make sure xe gets xer sword’, or along those lines.”
He still seemed confused, or perhaps disturbed, but he nodded along anyhow. “So, I could say, xe is my soulmate?” He pronounced 'xe’ horribly, mangling the x like 'zschze’. “Not that I would say tell anyone that, probably. But that’s how it works?”

I nodded. “I am so curious… you really have nothing like that in your homeland?”
He reached up a hand to brush the side of his head, feeling the prickly short hair. “Probably somewhere, but um… they, we, we might’ve been told that part of the reason we should kill you is because you… what did they say exactly? 'Bastardize the natural reality of the masculine and feminine’? Which, I guess wasn’t based on nothing?”

“That is. Fucking disgusting. Do I look like a bastard to you?”

The idiot did actually give me a once-over at that. “I dunno if I can tell by looking.”

I frowned at him. "Come on. You know they only told you that stuff to demonize us. Thousands of people live the way I do daily, and the sky has not fallen, has it? The grass has not turned purple, it has not helped either side win the war. Please, try not to think that way anymore.”
“Yeah. I’ll… try. It’ll just take some getting used to. Tell me if I mess up, alright?"  
"Of course. I will explain to you anything you need. Just, think, I am not trying to bend reality. I am only trying to live as myself.”

“…yeah, I. I can’t believe they framed it that way. Wow, I guess it is pretty disgusting. Wow. The stuff they told us, and now I’m sitting here, really talking to one… Oh my god.” He puts his hands on his knees like he was going to be sick.

“If you vomit, do it over the side, not on the floor, please.”
He gave me a thumbs up.

---

The sailing was easy. Once, we got stuck on a couple rocks, and had to wrangle the boat off of them. That was about the extent of our issues, which seemed just a bit too lucky. This stretch of water was long and cut through featureless land, sparse plains and sometimes farmland. There was nothing for us to do but wait, or try to make a plan.

Rafe had gotten bored a while ago. After recovering from his realization, he seemed antsy. He had started playing with the bell, but got bored of that not soon after. He then took to stirring up the water, making it swirl and ripple, and now he was laying on the deck and staring at the clouds. Having taken off some of his armor to lay down more comfortably, since the chances of danger out here were much slimmer than in the inlet. The pieces rested around his head like offerings at a shrine. It seemed about late afternoon by now.

“…What if we just went back?” He didn’t look at me as he asked, just kept staring into the sky, carefully avoiding the glare of the sun in his eyes.

“Oh, that’s a perfect plan, Rafe. It isn’t like that would be the first thing we thought of, or anything.”

“No, hear me out - we turn around and go back, pretend we just got lost or knocked out for a while. Sure, we’d look cowardly, but everything might be normal again, sorta.”
The thought took me. What would happen? Sneaking back into camp and pretending to have gotten lost. It was still the same day, so the battle would have turned routine into clean-up, moving bodies and filling out reports. That is, if anyone there had survived. It was possible one side had killed all the others. A pit opened in my stomach at the mental image of my outpost deserted and massacred.

“…You are forgetting about that archer. She found our banners. At least one person knows someone blue and someone yellow are working together. Who knows if she’s tattled?”

Rafe clicked his tongue and sighed raggedly, frustrated. “That’s true. That, uh, brings up another reason, actually - could either of us really go back, knowing the other’s out there?”

“Ha, what do you mean by that?”

“Even if we don’t know each other that well yet, or whatever. Could you go back to fighting, knowing I’m on the other side, and I’m your soulmate? The one person in the world that can’t hurt you… even if there’s no feelings, that’s a useful person to have around.”

I blinked, considering that line of thought. He had a point. The thought of him, out there, and that I might have no control over whether he died by another’s hands - troubling. A soulmate would be extremely useful to have around. Someone who could never hurt you no matter if they wanted to or not. Maybe the logic seemed a bit heartless, but at this point it was the best either of us had.

“No. I do not think that I could. I would like to keep you around, at least as a friend, or, some sort of 'runaway truce’ type of relationship. Re-entry would be hard, regardless. If I, or you, made a single misstep, I would be put to death. Wait, what would be the penalty for you?”

“Oh, uh. Just prison. For quite a long time… 20 years, I think? Or maybe it varies.”

“Great. We’re going to be wanting to avoid that one, too. Oh - what if we, somehow, get rid of the bond?”

“Get - what?” He propped himself up on his elbows to look at me. “How, under any sun, would we ever break the bond?”

“What, what do you mean what? Does your country not have those,” I waved my hands around, “those powerful magic users in those big gold towers, the magi?”

He barked a short, laugh. “What! Do you mean the scholars? They can’t do magic! I think they study it, but most of those stuffed-up dweebs wouldn’t know a spell if it wormed it’s way up their noses. No. What are you even talking about?”

I tilted my head, and thought about what I knew of Rafe’s kingdom. It was not much, admittedly. Likely less than the average citizen would know, since a lot of my prior perceptions had been called wrong after I joined the military. But there had been stories, of those who could harness the wild magic that thrummed through our world, honed it to an expert degree. And of the grand schools sprawling across our enemy country, dedicated to perfecting these powerful and dangerous magi. Had that been entirely false?
“We… we were told that your army worked with magicians. That is why we had to fight harder, since you had such nefarious powers on your side. The magi helped you keep the upper hand over us.”

“Hahaha. Oh, no, my friend. We just have the upper hand because we’re better.”

“Hey, alright, don’t be mean! No need to go so far!” I had an easy grin on, able to appreciate the joke.

He matched my grin with one of his own, shifting to lean an elbow on the edge of the boat. “How far? You mean how far ahead of you in the war we are? I mean, by the looks of that outpost, we outnumbered you quite heavily. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole place is -”

“Wait. Stop, stop. Shut up. Seriously. Don’t.” I covered my ears with my hands and leaned forward, curling closer to my knees.

Rafe fell silent immediately. His lips parted as if to apologize, but all that escaped was a small puff of air and then they were closed again.

The silence that fell over our little boat was like a heavy cloud. In our excitement, we had forgotten who we were. It was true that I had found no real attachment to my fellows, but that didn’t mean I wanted to think about them all dead. Lying in the dirt, blood cooling and drying, no one around to bury him… now I was the one that felt sick. What had we done? What had I done? How could Rafe even think that was okay to talk about? Even though I was more partial to silence, this one in particular felt a bit too sharp. Like a swarm of knives was hanging over out heads with every passing second.

Unable to bear it, I broke it, quietly asking, “So… those magi are not real, then?”

He hesitated, as if unsure if he was allowed to talk even though I’d asked, before shaking his head. “No. There are magic users, but, no. There’s no official magician council, or anything." 
So there was no escape. We’d be stuck together. Of course, I could always ditch him at the first chance - but why would I abandon the one person I had a chance to trust? I folded my hands across my chest, fingers tracing the hammered symbols. "We… we will figure it out. We just need more time to think. It’s only been… a few hours. Too much to take in.”

He nodded and looked towards the water, expecting that to be it from me.  

I continued talking, “But for now, we do have a goal. We need to find some village or farmhouse along this stream so we can stop, get some supplies, food. Maybe a night’s sleep if we can manage it. Getting some rest might help us think.” The sun was still up, but still, sleep sounded so nice.
“I agree.” His speech was stiff, as if there was a mechanism releasing his words rather than his vocal cords. “I don’t really know what to do at this point. There’s nothing in this boat besides the two of us and a bell, and we can’t eat that.”

After that, the conversation died. We both looked off in different directions, either looking for somewhere to stop or watching for danger. The truth was neither of us knew how to speak to each other anymore. In the distance, I thought I saw bricks, and a chimney puffing smoke.