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Minato looked out the window and saw the sky empty but for the stars, listened for gunfire or bombs going off in the distance and heard nothing, checked the screen of his uni-device again and found it empty of new messages. It really is over was a thought he barely dared to put in words even in his own head, yet it seemed to be the truth.
Torath, his captain, sat next to him on the white bench in the cramped doctor’s office. After a battle like the one they had just lived through, with the amount of wounded it had resulted in, the privacy of patience couldn’t be much of a concern anymore. They were lucky they had gotten the chance to swallow some pain killers and have their wounds stitched and glued shut, though the fact that they had landed the last blow on a Construct flagship, Minato on flight controls and Torath as the gunner, would have something to do with being pushed ahead in the queue for treatment.
“How are you doing?” Minato asked, looking over at Torath.
Torath, who was not a human, but had fought for their military for the last twelve years regardless after his parents had abandoned him in the undercity slums of London. Torath, the man Minato had met at the start of the war when he was thrown onto Torath’s ship as a replacement for a pilot killed in action by a rogue Construct unit, way in the beginning when they’d hardly known what the tin-men were, and who he’d stuck with for six years of chaos, more than half a decade now. Torath, currently looking down at the patchwork of cuts on his arm, from when a missile fired by a Construct ship had ripped cracks into their hull and metal pieces sharp as needles rained down on them. Torath, the man he’d been in love with for so many years he couldn’t say when it had started anymore.
They’d been lucky to be within Terra’s orbit when the big guns hit them. Otherwise, Torath and himself along with everyone on that bridge would have been suffocated by the great nothing of space.
“I should ask you that,” Torath said. His voice, always the sound of gravel, was even deeper after so many days and nights of shouting commands.
“It will be fine,” Minato said. “The splinters missed my eyes.”
When the wall of the bridge exploded, Torath had been able to shield his face with his arm, but Minato had not taken his hands off the flight controls, pressing down hard, forward, forward, until their failing ship stabbed the massive Construct vessel like a spearhead. He’d needed to steer true because he was aiming for a hole in its side that a well-aimed missile from Torath had already torn into the metal. The crashing weight of their ship destroyed the main control hub that had sent orders to a myriad of other Constructs. Only when this was done did Minato let Torath pull him out of his seat to get to the escape pods with the rest of the crew. Because of the shock, he’d only later felt the pain where fire and debris had torn at his the skin of his face like burning claws.
He did not regret doing what he did, but Torath’s worried look, his all-black eyes narrowed and the skin above his broad, leonine nose wrinkled in concern, told him that his face was probably beyond repair. They’d still needed a few hours to get to a treatment facility after hitting topside on Terra and if you wanted to prevent scarring, medicinal gel had to be applied quickly.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he told Torath, glancing away.
Usually, Torath’s gaze laid very differently on him. Not that they had ever done something about it – there were still rules of the military, and despite some vague words exchanged, some hints made, they hadn’t had the space of mind to risk the one person they could hold on to as stable through this galaxy-spanning war.
Now, though, it might be too late.
Torath frowned at him, but Minato was too tired to squabble now. At least Torath did not move away, a rock next to him, his clawed, three-fingered hands curled tightly around the edge of the bench. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. For now, Minato was just grateful that Torath was still next to him. He had to imagine it was the same for Torath, considering how unlikely it was that they had both somehow made it to this point alive.
The Construct had always been a strange enemy to fight. They were heartless in the literal sense, not malicious; they’d have had to be conscious first. When the Construct had been awoken by a few hapless archaeologists six years ago, they had checked for their makers and found only intruders, which, according to their settings, had to be eradicated, and they had woken dormant clusters of their kind spread out over the Sol and many adjacent systems for that purpose. A swift reaction and terrifying, too – it made Minato happy he had never met the people who had written their programs, even though after six years of fighting what was essentially just someone’s security system, he would admit to being curious. Surely, not all of them would have felt protected by this doomsday weapon, either. And what could have killed them, in the end? Torath’s theory, spun on long evenings sat in their ship’s small mess, was that since the Construct still seemed to have such firepower, perhaps it had turned against its creators, too, through some glitch or virus in the system. The theory seemed compelling to Minato, though he would often bring up the fact that they had no idea if the Construct they were fighting wasn’t indeed some remnant of a much bigger system already mostly destroyed in an unknown ancient war. They would then wonder about the potential people who might have accomplished beating the construct, but never for too long. Life had been difficult enough without inventing another danger lurking behind the stars.
Minato let his thoughts linger on their enigmatic enemy as he watched time pass on an old-fashioned round clock with hands that hung on the wall. They were only waiting to be discharged now, but since they had already checked that their crew had made it out more or less in one piece, there was really nothing Minato wanted to do other than sit with Torath next to him while the exhaustion worked through his system, so he might as well do it here.
Of course, he was not the only one on whom the fighting, the last week of the final battle or the last half decade of a war of attrition, had taken a toll. Minato winced as Torath’s weight suddenly slumped against him, boneless, warm. However, having checked that he was only asleep and not unconscious, he held still, a small smile pulling painfully at a cut in his face. While Minato had eventually taught himself to catch an hour of sleep here and there even in the heat of an ongoing conflict, Torath was always like electrified until the worst was over. He doubted that Torath had slept at all in the last three days.
Minato was tall for a human man and as a soldier, he had to keep in shape; but Torath dwarved him, both in height, but more impressively in muscle mass, which his kind developed a lot easier than humans. His hair, the same copper red as his skin, always grew wild, and since appearance protocols had fallen to the wayside as they struggled in their extinction war, it was currently a veritable mane (not that Minato could talk; he’d always hidden a long braid under his armour and helmet). It tickled Minato’s neck, or the patches of it that still had feeling, anyway, where the fire and shrapnel hadn’t reached, the rest of it now numbed after the nurse had applied a powerful anti-inflammatory gel that would hopefully help the skin heal.
It made him aware of the position in which Torath laid, lopsided, putting stress on the shoulder where the arm had just been set again. Carefully, slowly, hoping not to wake him, Minato took hold of Torath. Big as he might be, Minato was strong enough to lay Torath over his lap without jostling him too much. Torath muttered something inaudible under his breath, but did not wake.
Resting one hand on Torath’s head, Minato leaned back against the wall. A small screen had been put up in a corner of the room, running the news without tone. It flicked between reports of people being pulled out of piles of rubble, fires slowly being extinguished, soldiers swarming over the deactivated Construct ships and ripping out their main computers to disable them for good. So much had been destroyed, but so much – so many – were still here, too.
Outside, he heard steps approaching, someone entering the office in front of the examination room. Minato gently jostled Torath’s side until he woke with an unwilling growl, then sat up quickly when he realised his position, flustered as he looked at Minato with those beautiful, void-coloured eyes.
“There was no pillow to rest you on,” Minato said with a shrug.
-
When they were finally released, Torath led them through debris-filled streets straight towards the west Berlin hangar in which the Metalmark had been parked. On the way, he asked Minato to ping the crew to ask them whether they would return to the ship or join up with their families, should they live on Terra.
“It’s probably going to be lively soon. Not many who have someone to go back to,” Minato told Torath.
“That’s red class recon for you. Bunch of antisocial bastards,” Torath said with a snort and no lack of affection. “It’s not like we’re going anywhere, either. Though you might want to visit Haruto soon, yeah?”
Minato and his younger brother had wormed their way through consolidated interplanetary Sol system foster care, holding on to each other with more force than sense, until Minato had joined the army the day he was old enough, finally able to pay for Haruto to get an apartment and go to a proper school. Haruto lived on a city-station now, running a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, thankfully out of the way of the main theatres of war. Torath was the first of his colleagues Minato had ever introduced to Haruto, always careful to let his dangerous work bleed into his brother’s life. By this point, Torath had basically adopted Haruto.
“Already shot him a message. He’s going to want to see you, too,” Minato told him.
Torath nodded his head. “If it doesn’t bother you.”
“Why would it? I hang around you all the time, anyway. Besides, I know you’re not going to take your shore leave on a quiet farming world, anyway.”
The had always been similar in that way. On the eve of battle last night, when they’d been both fairly certain they would not get out of this one alive, they had talked about retirement. A big city station, or maybe a multi-story metropolis on Terra or Mars, with bright lights and streets enough to get lost in, that would be the place to be.
“Right,” Torath said. “Just wouldn’t want to bother you during the reunion.”
Having never had much of a family himself, Torath was still sometimes hesitant about the role he had in Minato’s small remnant of one. Minato could feel in the mix of hope and hesitance that he worried about being an interloper, even after all these years. It was unnecessary. As far as he was concerned, Torath was as much family to him as Haruto – though he certainly did not think of him as a brother.
He rubbed his hand thoughtfully over the cuts on his face.
“Stop touching them. You’ll end up tearing a wound open,” Torath groused.
“I doubt it makes much of a difference at this point,” Minato said with a small smile.
“It’ll hurt, so that’s the difference.”
For the battle, they had taken over the Yellowstone, which had greater firepower and whose former crew had died to a slow-moving poison a month ago. Their actual ship was the small recon skipper Metalmark that Minato could take to thread a meteoroid storm, sporting guns so precise with a gunner like Torath at the helm it could shoot the thrusters off a pirate ship from half a solar system away. However, the Construct ships, not hampered by having to be designed with organics in mind, where best cracked open with brute force.
After a quick conversation with the staff at the hangar, Torath pulled his access card out of his pocket. Over his shoulder, Minato saw the men and women in uniform whisper among each other. Torath, too, noticed it, but only looked back to Minato in the contamination chamber.
“It really was our suicide manoeuvre that took down the flagship, wasn’t it?” he asked, almost confused.
“I think so, yes. Haruto says they said our names in the broadcast he watched.”
They both stood in silence for a moment. They had worked in the military for over a decade but the nature of their work was clandestine and the idea of heroism was a strange fit for it, for them, who’d both not ended up in this career for the sake of ideals, anyway.
Wordless with the realisation of what might be to come, they entered the ship.
“Well,” Minato said, “tonight everybody will be too busy picking up the pieces. Let’s get some rest while we still can. They will make you celebrate, you know?”
Torath was the kind of man who’d rather spend any evening in the mechanical guts of Metalmark, practicing his aim in the simulator, or training his hand-to-hand combat in the practice room than at a party. Consequently, he shook his head with a grim expression.
“They need to give you some time to rest,” he said, to Minato’s surprise, instead of a complaint about the idea of celebration.
The doors to the ship opened and they stepped through. Only the emergency lighting was on, a dotting of lights in the ceiling along the spine of the ship. They both turned habitually towards the cockpit, running their eyes over the idle numbers and measurements displayed there. Minato suspected that it was just as calming for Torath to know that technically, the Metalmark was ready for take-off at any moment, could take them into space and wherever they wanted. Red recon didn’t usually fight at the frontlines and the whole crew preferred their freedom, cut loose and only under the amount of Torath most of the time.
“Let’s see how much time we get to ourselves. I’m sure they’ll need all hands to pick up what’s left of the Construct.”
“Someone’s going to attempt to reverse-engineer their own version,” Torath said flatly. “That won’t go wrong.”
“I hope they’re smarter than that,” Minato said, lagging a couple of steps behind Torath, tiredness still spreading through his body. He was not optimistic enough to be certain.
“I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. The Construct is still too advanced, anyway. But now we have some leverage if we really dealt the last blow. As your captain, I won’t have you back on duty before your wounds are healed.”
“Your arm needs rest, too.”
Minato had to chuckle as he saw the almost affronted look on Torath’s face. “Flesh wounds and a sprain,” he said, but to wave Minato’s words away, he did use his good hand.
Minato shook his head at him, but did not argue, too exhausted even though he often enjoyed their small quarrels and was certain Torath did, too. However, they were unnecessary here, anyway, as Torath already knew Minato would drag him away if he tried to train like this.
They walked on in silence. Both of them slept in the bunk beds crammed in the back of the mess with the rest of the small crew and Minato just thought about crawling in there with some yearning when Torath caught him by the arm. As Minato turned, he barely had time to lift his eyes to look at his face before Torath kissed him, hard and determined.
“Ah,” Minato made, as they parted. His heart was hammering.
“Are you really surprised?”
Torath’s voice was gruff, though Minato, so used to him, heard the trace of insecurity behind the growl. True, is had almost happened a few times before, and on worse nights during the war he’d promised himself he’d ask Torath out for a drink when it was all over, just to have that light at the far-off end of the tunnel, and he’d suspected it had been similar for Torath. However, things had changed, after all.
“I thought it might be off the table, considering all of this.”
He gestured at his face, the marred skin. Human faces were not so different from those of Torath’s kind that he couldn’t be repulsed by the spiderweb of future scars and burns, after all.
Torath frowned at him.
“What the fuck is going on in your mind?” he asked, shaking his head as he took Minato’s wrist in his hand and pulled him along.
The reaction was so blunt that Minato had to laugh. Maybe Torath was right. How could he expect to be abandoned after all these years because of something so trivial? It was an insult to his friend. He’d always been a steadier sort than that. Minato’s heart seemed to expand in his chest until its fast beat was painfully thrumming against his ribcage.
Torath had his own captain’s cabin, but he’d stripped that and turned it into a practice room, choosing to sleep in the bunk beds with the crew instead. Whatever authority he might have lost through giving away the signs of his power, he could easily win again by putting them on their ass in a sparring match; and anyway, the crew, including Minato, liked him for sticking with them.
There were a couple bedsteads stuffed against the side of the training mats that they’d screwed to the floor, though, which they used when the two beds on the medbay were full. Minato thought to himself that they really should be lying in them for that purpose of recuperation, but when Torath locked the door with a swipe of his card, he knew he would not be so reasonable just yet.
He was the one who grabbed Torath by the shoulders, careful to miss the bandage that he knew to go up all the way of his arm under the frayed uniform jacket, and pulled him down into a kiss. As Torath’s arms closed around him, Minato felt some modicum of peace for the first time since the war had started, despite the fact that his wounds touched his lips and kissing still hurt.
They parted, Torath staring down at him. Being a pilot, Minato had always thought that Torath’s eyes looked like space at its most amazing, where it stretched on and on into eternity.
His searing gaze was hard to ignore, even hard to stand up to, bearing down on him at this moment. Minato had been called beautiful before, with his friendly, pleasing face; he rather figured he’d scare people now. However, Torath ran his thick fingers over Minato’s long hair, pulling the tie that held the tousled braid, and Minato thought, not without confusion, that Torath still looked at him like the sight itself was something he enjoyed, not just tolerated for the sake of the man behind that torn face.
They sank on the bed together. While Torath’s arm and Minato’s face were most affected, the rest of them was covered in bruises as well. Their options would be limited tonight, but that didn’t matter since it was not going to be the last time.
They pulled at each other’s parade uniforms, the only thing the hospital had had to dress them in after cutting off their ruined armour, neither of them patient enough to navigate their various scrapes. Torath’s hand pushed under Minato’s shirt and Minato felt the soft drag of claws as he pawed him.
“I know you hate them, but you do look good in dress blues,” Minato joked, running his hands over Torath’s chest.
Torath grunted, glancing down at Minato’s hands on him.
“If you like it, that might motivate me to put them on for the victory pony shows,” he said.
Minato kissed him again and tugged down the zipper. “You have to admit they’re easier to open than battle armour, too,” he added, as he pulled Torath’s cock out of the standard edition white briefs.
He’d seen it many times in the showers, thick and long as it was, but never when it was hard. The colour shift was more drastic than a human’s as it filled in his hand, going from burnished red to a black hue. Considering the coal colour of Torath’s blood and the way his face tended to grow dark when he blushed, it did not surprise him, but the effect was fascinating at the same time.
“I would blow you,” he said apologetically, “but one cut goes to the corner of my mouth and I don’t want to tear it open.”
“I can see that,” Torath noted. “Lay down, wait...”
He hovered above him, but while his other arm was not hurt, the exertion of the last days left it shaking, and so he crashed down on Minato, who gasped as he pushed the air out of his lungs.
“Maybe we could lie facing each other,” he said, chuckling breathlessly.
They did, and that worked well enough with Minato hooking his leg over Torath’s thigh. So closely slotted together, he could kiss Torat’s chest after unbuttoning his shirt while Torath buried his face in Minato’s black hair, wound one hand through the long strands. Torath squeezed their cocks together in his large palm, carefully bending his claws out of the way, and Minato let one had join his, his blunt fingernails allowing him to be more dextrous in his movements. Torath was gritting his teeth to swallow his noises.
Minato’s movements were unhurried, slow and thorough. He hadn’t had sex like this since he could remember; all his lovers had been short stints during shore leaves. He was not looking over his shoulder now to see if someone came into the alley they’d picked, not worried that his one-night-stand would try to steal his purse or slip a dagger between his ribs, and even for the ones that he was fairly sure were harmless, a life in recon had never allowed him to close his eyes and indulge in the warmth of the presence of someone, being habitually distrustful. However, had he lost his eyes today, he’d still have allowed Torath to lead him through a minefield.
Somehow, it was that thought, Torath dragging him along by the wrist as he’d done to get him here, that unexpectedly had him come, breathing out hard against Torath’s chest. He kept moving his hand, never faltering, rubbing his fingers greedily over the soft, heated skin, and when Torath game, his good arm squeezed Minato so hard he lost air for another moment and enjoyed it.
Minato was the one who tucked them both back in as Torath still caught his breath, fumbling clumsily for the blanket. At he looked at Minato, he gave him one of his rare smiles, showing his long canine teeth.
“I can’t wait for shore leave,” Minato said, slotting himself against Torath’s side.