Viktor and Valeria begin a largely physical (though not entierly unemotional) relationship under the walls of Pannu Yakuta. When Flik returns to the army, complicated feelings between Flik and Viktor are rekindled as well. What may look like a predictable plot about jealously and choosing sides gets shot all to shit when everyone involved in the drama get locked into a local dictator's secret prison with no hope of rescue.
To explain this fanfiction another way: I have developed a LOT of headcanons about how shit goes down at Soniere Prison over time. I always assumed the main party was down there a LONG time, since 1. Soniere's location is secret and 2. no one knows that they've been captured at first (the mission was secret as well). Mathiu has to decide something is wrong, figure out where they are, and get the whole army there. to rescue them.
My party the first time I was thrown in Soniere was Tir, Gremio, and Luikan, then Viktor, Flik, Valeria, and assorted elves, so they are the people getting locked in Soniere and then dealing with the long-term fallout in this fic. This is a shipfic at heart, but as always, I kept getting distracted by worldbuilding.
Mature for both adult themes and explicit content. Heavier on the themes, though.
Viktor/Flik, Viktor/Valeria, brief Flik/Viktor/Valeria. Kirkis/Sylvina gets an odd amount of wordcount as always.
I made up the ships out of pure quitessence in my alchemical laboratory, for one thing.
I know this is a nonsense ship I made up, but this fic is good. Short, maybe too fast-paced, but good. Give her a chance.
Someone stood over his head, to his right.
Viktor sat in front of a hitching post that currently had no horse tied to it, sharpening the edge of his sword. The person above him had leaned onto it; he hadn’t looked up at them yet, but whoever they were, they had the weight and strength to make it shift behind his shoulders.
“Viktor,” she said, short and sharp.
Viktor smiled to himself. He drug the sharpening stone deftly and quickly up one side of the sword. He let its hiss fade before he said, “Hey, Jailbird.”
So had he dubbed General Valeria, having met her in the singular, spare holding cell of the village of the elves, thrown in together by its suspicious and xenophobic leader. At the time Valeria had been filthy and unkempt, her tangled red hair pulled into a frizzy braid, her armor tied over dirt and dried blood. She had cleaned up after they all escaped but hadn’t actually dressed up, he now realized, until they had rejoined the army and began marching to Pannu Yakuta to defeat her former commander. She was now a tall, intimidating, poised mass of lean muscle in a red dress, her hair a lion’s mane behind her.
Most everyone else was still calling her either “Lieutenant” or “General”, caught in the confusion between the world she had occupied, the Empire, the Army, its rigid hierarchy, and the amorphous world of the Liberation Army that she had entered. No one but her knew where she really stood.
She was someone important no matter what. Enough cracked skulls had proven that.
“We’re a day or two away from the fort,” she said.
Viktor nodded. “Depends on how well we navigate the terrain around. Might hit it tomorrow, might have to lay in wait until the morning after.” He was hoping for tomorrow, but only a very few of them knew the ravine-ridden, river-bounded territory around the eastern fort well. Rushing the troops would be a mistake.
“I think our chances for victory are just about even.”
“Really?” he asked, looking up at her. Her face, as usual, was as composed as stone. “That’s a lot of faith in a ragtag rebel army.”
“You have a lot of qualities he’s not expecting.”
“He has a city-destroying divine weapon. And a fort, with a much bigger army than ours inside.”
“And a dragon.”
“And a dragon,” Viktor sighed.
“What he hasn’t had in far too long,” Valeria continued, just as even, just as unemotional, “is anyone who really believes in him. Without that, sooner or later, whether hundreds or thousands die on his side or ours, he will fail. This battle, the next one, or five years on, he will fail.”
Viktor paused. He wondered about the relationship between commander and lieutenant, as he had often before. Valeria never spoke of Kwanda with anything but utmost respect even though, by her own report, she had tried to tear his throat out with an armored gauntlet on the ramparts of Pannu Yakuta right before he picked her up and cast her down into a river below.
“Are you trying to warn me that you’re about to jump the line and go back to him when we get there?” Viktor asked. “You can just tell me. I’m not going to stop you. I don’t even have a holding cell to keep you in, Jailbird.”
Valeria snorted. “Yes, over the battlelines, through the front door, bounding up stairways to the former war-room which he has fitted out with a throne instead and gracefully onto his lap to finish the job I started by seizing his spine with these two hands and wrenching.”
Viktor let a shudder in his shoulders become a cool shake of his head. He was not put off by how visceral the image was but by her ice-cool expression while painting it. That would give any rational man pause. “I’ll do my best to give you that opportunity, but these things can be unpredictable on the field, you know.”
“I do know.”
“That’s not how I meant that—”
“No, I know you’re not stupid enough to insult my experience.”
“Not that stupid, no. I saw you work when that company attacked us in the kobold village.”
Then, Valeria smiled. Those smiles were rare. Fresh blood seemed to be the easiest way to draw them out. Viktor had no question at all about how this woman had risen through the ranks so remarkably quickly; she enjoyed fighting as much as she was skilled at it, and she was as skilled as she enjoyed it, and both of those amounts were great.
“Do you know I’ve had my eye on you, mercenary?”
Viktor slid the sharpening stone along the length of his sword again. After a second, he sighed, long, faux-forlorn. “It’s only wise! I’m a soldier of fortune. I might get bored and head out on my way any time.”
“Ha. Not like that.”
“Oh, you think I’m a worthy opponent? I’m flattered, but I’m not sure that I am.”
“Don’t act modest, I don’t like it. You may well be, and we’ll have to spar some time to test it. But that isn’t what I meant either.”
Viktor looked up at Valeria and met her eyes.
For a moment his throat went dry. His body froze. A shock indistinct between fear and arousal made his blood hold still for a heartbeat. He was shaking very slightly once it faded.
He smiled, and purposefully looked back down at his sword, rubbing forefinger and thumb along the edge. He hummed, as if considering.
He had been giving her sideways looks as well, but he had had no idea how a pass might be received. The last thing he was going to do was endanger a war effort by alienating female officers. But there was just something about Valeria, about her coldness, her firmness, the twin talents of sharp observation and callous disregard that made her a force of derision and disdain. Valeria thought everyone around her, bar none, could be doing better; if they held themselves up to the standards she held herself to, requiring utmost skill and exactitude and to be willing to burn your very house down if you concluded that it needed to burn, they would be. Valeria believed passionately in doing the right thing, no matter what or who stood in her way. She was beautiful, stunning, even, but that grim passion was what intrigued Viktor.
“Men tend to act foolish on the eve of battle,” Valeria continued, her voice, sharp before, lower and softer. She did not move, though. She stood against the pole, her arms across her chest. “The fear of death puts the lust for life in them. You see people chose couplings they wouldn't have imagined before.”
“I know that too,” Viktor replied. “I may be more used to alley skirmishes than great battles, but the same thing happens to a mercenary facing what may well be the last job of his life.” When the blood was pounding, when death was close, life raged inside.
“I can never sleep before a battle,” Valeria said. “I’ll be up all night no matter what. If you want to join me, then come on, or I’ll pick someone else.”
Viktor felt and discarded the urge to act hard to get. He wasn’t a boy playing love-games. Her offer was quite clear. He could take it if he wanted, or tell her to go find someone else, but acting like he was courting a maiden would be a mistake.
He stood and rolled his neck, which had been bent to focus on his task for too long. At the end of that circle he faced her. “That depends,” he said, “have you got my fee?”
Valeria snorted. Then, she laughed. It was brief, it was sharp, but it was genuine. Viktor wasn’t sure he had heard her laugh before. “We can discuss your payment afterwards, mercenary.”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not. Pay up front or I don’t do the work.”
“That’s robbery.”
“When you live my kind of life, Miss, that’s just what’s expected.”
Valeria snorted again, and then, a spark of inspiration came into her eyes. She reached both arms behind her neck and unclasped the hook of a thick gold necklace. She pulled it up, revealing that she had been wearing what had once been her insignia, her golden seal of office as the Great General’s lieutenant, under her dress. She pulled it into one hand, reached out, and then dropped it unceremoniously into the rebel leader’s hand.
“Is that enough, mercenary?” she asked.
Viktor closed his hand around the sharp ridges of the insignia, the amulet that once made her the imperial officer she was, respected even by those who hated her for her talent, her position, her cold disdain.
He could not possibly keep it. He would leave it on her pillow when he left her.
“Good enough for now,” he said, showing his teeth. “Show me the way, Jailbird.”
—
Viktor would never have guessed that that was the start of a relationship. It was improbable. He tended to drift between lover and lover, and they vanished while he wasn’t paying attention. Valeria’s standards were far too high to remain with him for long, or so he thought.
Yet as time moved forward, after Pannu Yakuta was won, as the long winter passed in Toran, he only saw more of her, not less.
Valeria was a strange girl, among all of the other things she was. She would take what she wanted, without talking about it, but that wasn’t because she didn’t really care about it. When they finished making love, she usually stayed beside him, watching, taking idly, or looking out the window at the snow dancing. She was never sweet, she never clung. She would lay beside him in silence, with her eyes sometimes on the curve of his palm lying on the pillow, and he would see the thoughts in her eyes, the silent appreciation, the feeling spoken quite keenly without words. Val was someone who did not much express herself; the minutes of holding his hand in the darkness were rare and as much as she would give. Viktor knew he would never actually hold the heart just outside of his reach, but he could hear it pounding at night, and slowly slip closer to it.
He was glad no one ever asked him if he loved her, because while he wouldn’t have been able to say he did, he would have been stuck trying to put what he did feel into words. Most assumed their relationship was strictly physical, though they worked well together in most things. Viktor was able to watch her smile when he made her laugh, which he got better and better at. She did fight like a demon, and it was thrilling to spar with her. (Her quickness, brutality, and skill were stunning, enviable, and a sight to behold. She wasn’t an entertainer, either; she wouldn’t perform like that for just anyone.) When it came down to brass tacks, dirty dishes and broken pipes, they were equally willing to drop the prestigious titles and get to work. She had a head for logistics and was willing to poke at the threads of Mathiu’s intricately woven plans until they were all sure they were pulled tight.
On a brilliant spring day, soaked with dew, the white light broken into prisms everywhere on the waves, Flik returned to the Liberation Army, and to Viktor. Viktor remembered seeing him come around the curve of the stairs as he ran up the steps, and how a smile broke across his whole expressive face when he saw Viktor running down toward him, and how they knocked each other flat with an embrace the moment they met each other. And Valeria had waited behind him, cross-armed, unmoving, arch-browed, and condescending for as long as it took him to drag his exuberant, echoing best friend up to the top of the tower.
—
Original Note:
This one is a little headcanon-heavy, but such is life when it comes to the laconic nature of the classic JRPG. All of our experiences are colored by our first play-throughs, the parties we had, what we brought to the game in our heads. If anyone knows how I got so attached to Viktor/Valeria, a ship I literally made up, let me know. The main ship in this fic is Fliktor but this is a bisexual/multishipping zone.
There is a time skip between each chapter. They’re titled with the location they take place in so you know where we are in the timeline of the game, and I pretty much stick to that timeline. Viktor and Valeria trade off the POV. Full thing will be about 20K overall, I have the full draft and am posting as I edit.
Flik’s head rolled back on a bed of flags. Twelve or thirteen of them, torn from walls and windows, black and red, piled into a poor pillow; a dozen different scarlet moons split into crescents like moonlight on black waves. If it weren’t for them, he would be laying on bare, cold stone.
Valeria could see he had one fist clenched in Viktor’s rough, thick black hair. That palm was still encased in dirty, steel-studded leather, but that was normal for the paranoid, myopic drunk currently pinned half-naked on the prison floor. Breastplate and shinguards were scattered around him, but one arm was still armored, his headband clinging to his skull, his boots unlaced but not pried off, like a bear had only clawed at him long enough to get through his thick plating and to the soft insides.
Valeria herself was only bothering to put underwear on (and her boots, of course) unless she was walking up to visit Tir. Viktor would wear pants and that was it. The elves, downstairs, were just naked, which they claimed was normal for them anyway. Filk alone continued to arm himself against nothing, putting on layers, tying them tight.
His eyes squeezed shut and he groaned. Valeria saw how his roughly opened thighs were spasming and decided not to bother with leaving and coming back when they were done. They were nearly there anyway. Viktor gnawed on his partner’s throat, and he started grunting the strangled, blood-filled curses common to the barbarian men of the warrior tribes. “‘s Blood,” “Guts,” “Vinegar, Piss, Hot Bile.” They were always swearing like they were elbows-deep in a dead doe.
When she was Kwanda’s lieutenant, she used to say that men from the tribes were 50/50; that was, just as likely to desert as succeed. Flik would have deserted.
One of Flik’s muscled thighs, twice as pale as his exposed throat, tightened on Viktor’s back. Viktor made sure his partner finished first, as he always did. Flik groaned though his teeth as the man above him used his weight to his advantage; the sheer pressure and heat bearing down on his body coaxed an orgasm out of him. His mouth opened, and slowly, in increments, his bright blue eyes shone out of his head. Viktor finished soon after.
Valeria tapped the heel of her boot against the ground as Filk shakily put both hands in Viktor’s hair and carded them through the thick, dirty strands. It only made a very little, dull noise, like water dripping. She saw him breathe in to smell the older man’s thick scent, from his musky hair, his sweaty neck, the joint of his shoulder. She watched Viktor curl his arms around him.
Viktor had had a crush on his adorable little partner for as long as she had known him; others suggested it had been that way for years. He would never have used the word ‘crush’, and Valeria wouldn’t say it around him. ‘Your treasured brother-in-arms’, she would say, ‘Your boyfriend, not that he’s aware of it.’ Viktor had kept insisting that, while he was just a little too fond of his partner in high treason, he would never stress their relationship like that. Not even after Odessa’s death, once Filk was, technically, single. ‘You’ll laugh at me,’ Viktor had said, ‘but he is more important to me than that. I won’t push him away by pushing too far.’
That was why she would have called it a ‘crush’. Of course he wanted those muscled thighs, those lips swollen from biting and worrying, those strong arms, but his fear was stronger than his lust. The more Viktor felt about a person, the less he said about it. No matter the situation, what usually happened was that he and Flik silently got to work. They were beside each other if in the same room; they sat next to each other at every table. Even Tir had been unsteadied by how quickly Flik had monopolized Viktor’s attention after returning but had been good at hiding his jealousy. Still, Viktor had kept saying, ‘No, no, it will never happen. He’s like my brother. I don’t think any man could get him to lie down anyway.’
Like fire to a library, the ever more inevitable truth that they were all going to die locked inside Soniere Prison changed everything. Those sweet sentiments were not exempt.
Yes, they had tried everything. Finesse, brute force, every spell on every rune they had. Lockpicking, bludgeoning, and the devouring force of the Soul Eater alike did the same thing to the walls of Soniere: nothing. General Oppenheimer’s black magic was strong against hope itself. The only door was like a cave wall, and the rest was black earth around them. It was as though they were a thousand feet deep in the earth. Other than Tir, their most accomplished magician was Sylvina; she kept them healed through skirmishes with monsters, but now that the prison was cleared of monsters and they had turned even to cooking and eating what they could out of them, she could not heal the new hurts that threatened them. There were water pipes, and they worked, but they would be out of food soon.
Now Sylvina and her betrothed laid in a nest together, near the bottom of the prison; they checked in with the others every day or so, but there hadn’t been progress on escape from either side for weeks. Above, Luikan sat with Tir in endless vigil. In the middle, Viktor, Flik, and Valeria roamed. Valeria tended to travel between the levels the most, carrying messages from den to den, examining every corner of the prison over and over again.
She didn’t really have any other angles to explore when it came to escape. She hit the walls on occasion, just to do something. They were going to die in Soniere Prison.
She watched the two men, post-coital, curl into a kiss. She could see one of Flik’s eyes past Viktor’s face screwed up in emotion. Viktor growled, possessive, protective, as he used one thick, dirty hand to grasp at Filk’s skull.
Viktor had insisted to Valeria that it had been Flik who had come on to him. Valeria believed it. Flik had not exactly brought enough wine with him to remain his preferred level of drunk for the amount of time it took to starve to death underground. He had been sober within days and desperate for distraction within hours of being sober. For a while, he had compulsively fought with everyone, even Tir, who would only face away from him in stony silence. He fought Viktor and Valeria more literally, exhausting himself on purpose. Valeria was sure he had given into the urge to crawl on top of Viktor and distract himself another way the moment the idea occurred to him, as she was equally sure Viktor hadn’t been able to resist him for a second.
Whatever they had said to each other, however, whatever had passed between them in that first moment of connection and surrender, were locked away in prison cell like everything else they would do before they died.
Valeria watched Flik’s eye slide open and the ice-sharp blue within fix on her. He closed it again and continued kissing Viktor for a while, stuck to his body like the heat of intercourse had melted them together. After another minute, though, he lowered his shaking thigh, pulled the two together, and finally let his head fall back onto the soiled imperial flags. “Your girlfriend is here,” he grumbled, his voice low and thick.
Viktor kissed Flik’s neck one more time, right on top of a swollen bruise. She heard him grumble in his throat.
“I can wait,” she said. With there being nowhere else to stay, the two had settled into one of many identical prison cells. They had chained the door open so there was no possibility of getting accidentally locked in, they had made something of a bed out of whatever they could find, but it was a cell nonetheless. Valeria leaned on a half-wall of iron bars to speak to them.
“Enjoy the show, at least?” Viktor asked, sounding soft and satisfied. He cleared his throat and nestled into his partner instead of looking up at her.
In truth, she did not enjoy the show anymore. She wasn’t sure she had actually enjoyed anything in weeks. She would do it, though, because getting lost in passion for a minute was worth the break in monotony. She would probably have Viktor once before the day was over; maybe just his hands, if Flik had tired him out completely. It wasn’t impossible she would decide with the wisdom of the impulse to crawl in there with the both of them. She had done it before.
She already knew she was pregnant, technically. She had become so on purpose, because if she was dying in a locked prison (in which they had killed all of the guards but found no keys, because Oppenheimer had entrusted that to absolutely no one), she was at least not going to die cramping. The poor little thing, small as rice, would get no bigger. It was an organ, a function. She would die before she really felt it. She only knew it was there because it had fulfilled its intended purpose of drinking up her menstrual blood for her. She looked down at the men wrapped around each other and knew it could have been either of theirs; Flik had not protested at all at the suggestion, because like everything else, the matter of whose woman one was did not mean much anymore.
“To be honest,” she replied, “It’s a little touchy-feely for me.”
Flik lethargically rolled his eyes. Viktor used one hand to search the floor until he found something he could pick up (a shoe) and threw it at her.
It bounced off of the bars to her left. She didn’t flinch. “I went up to speak to Tir,” she said.
Viktor pulled himself halfway off of Flik, though his trailing arms remained on his shoulder and his side. “Did he speak back?”
“With words. I was impressed.”
“Ah,” said Viktor, and pulled himself off of the floor. Not far down the hall there was a spigot that they used to wash with. No one else moved, because there would be nothing that stopped them from speaking where they were. Flik shifted a little, on the ground, but laid his head back and closed his eyes again. “That much is good.”
Tir had not spoken at all, at first. Then, he had only spoken in grief; then, for a while he was their commander again, bending all his efforts to the task of freeing them from Soniere. When that proved impossible, he had fallen silent again. Now he usually sat with Luikan and listened to the old physician give lectures about medicine, biology, astronomy, philosophy. The poor old bastard had learned a lot in his years, and had accepted this was his final chance to teach. Tir, ever hurting to help, found a final purpose in listening to lessons that would never be passed on.
Valeria watched Flik stretch, his bare, wet skin flexing and twisting. He was, undeniably, an incredible example of manhood. Statue-like, he was perfectly proportioned and veined with enough scars to shatter the ideal and incite interest. Valeria wondered if she liked him, in the most base, most simple form of fondness. Time spent with him in darkness, even time spent as man and woman, had not engendered any feeling for him in her. If she really hunted, while looking down at his beautiful body, the dark eyelashes resting on pale cheek, she found only dull frustration.
May as well die here, she thought. If you got out, you would have to eventually face the humiliation of your boyfriend leaving you for this vapid, drunken prick.
He would. She knew he would. She had known on the night they had met in the inn in Kaku to convince him to come back to Toran castle with them, she had known the second she watched them both stumble up the stairs together, laughing and shouting. It was a good thing she didn’t love Viktor (she was fond, she liked his jokes, he was soft and warm) or else this would all be intolerable. As it was, it was unpleasant.
“What did he say?” Flik asked from the floor.
“He is under the impression he has been communicating with Lady Leknaat in his dreams,” Valeria informed them as Viktor doused himself with cold groundwater. “He thinks that she has told him that we will all be released once the stars align for it, and he means that literally. He thinks that she and him and her little magician are triangulating our position with dream coordinates.”
“I’ve got to get him away from that kid,” Viktor grumbled.
‘That kid’ was Leknaat’s apprentice, the odd, unsettling young magician who knew too much and seemed to be able to do anything when pressed hard enough. Valeria wasn’t sure she liked him either, but he was, in fact, a kid. She was more concerned with their several powerful and adult enemies with functioning armies. “I think we’ve accomplished that,” she noted.
“Well, if they’re strategizing in their dreams now, that’s a breach of war-room etiquette. The rest of us should be invited to that dream.”
“I don’t think that’s actually happening,” Valeria replied bluntly. “Tir doesn’t sound good.”
Viktor turned off the water. He replied with a heavy sigh.
“It’s technically an angle we haven’t explored,” said Flik. In the bitterness of his tone, he revealed that he, too, was completely convinced he was dying in the ground. That best explained his actions for the past few weeks, anyway.
“I’m going to give the rest of the food to Tir and the old man from now on,” Valeria informed both of them. “The elves insist they don’t waste as fast as us and won’t take any anyway. I’d rather Tir has the best chance, and I can’t take letting an old man starve himself.”
“I was going to suggest something like that too,” said Viktor, walking back. “Just stop bringing the two of us anything. You take a bite or two of something from time to time.”
He stood behind her, wat, naked, warm. He wrapped one arm around her waist. She closed her eyes.
“There’s no way around it,” she heard Flik say, placid. “I can’t convince him to not do it, so I’m not… not… doing it either. Oh, whatever.”
She opened her eyes and looked down at him. His beloved sword was by the wall, above his head, like a bright ghost hovering over him. She guessed that he would choose that sword when the choice became inevitable. Viktor might try to choose the same, but secretly, she was planning to finish him herself, while he was sleeping, and hopefully without waking him up.
Tir might make it out alone, but for some reason, perhaps because she was getting dizzy with hunger herself, Valeria felt like he would.
“How much more is there to eat?” asked Viktor from behind her.
“A couple of pounds of meat, a basket of mushrooms that should be edible. Not much. I keep making the same stew and bringing up two bowls to them, but that’s going to be it after a while.”
“How did we end up with Valeria cooking?” Flik asked the ceiling.
“None of you can, except Sylvina, and she doesn’t like seeing dead meat. I can put shit in a pot and boil it.”
“I can do that,” Viktor scoffed.
“Great. Then you can do that until we’re out.”
“I will. Sorry, I’ve been slacking.”
Slacking. Valeria felt how his big, warm body enfolded her, how it was already slighter than it used to be, the muscle and fat being slowly pared away. He had probably been refusing to eat for longer than he had put on. He had been taking care of a whole army; she could not imagine how intolerable the last few weeks had been for him, with nothing to give and no solutions to ever-increasing problems.
“Maybe you can get him to talk more,” she said, eventually. “He’s very fond of you, you know.”
“Hm. More than he should be. I am going to lead him down a path of degeneracy and ruin, like Gremio said.”
“He likes you. You’re not going to have a worse impact on him than starving to death in a prison. Go father-bear him for a while if it cheers you both up.”
“Ugh. I don’t want him to see me looking like a mess.”
“He doesn’t look good himself, Viktor. He’s in the pit too. None of us look good. Do what you can.”
Aggravatingly, Flik backed her up. “You’re not protecting him from anything. He knows everyone is dying down here. You’re going to have to face upsetting him eventually.”
Viktor made a noise of frustration. That was it for him, of course; like a cat, he was determined to curl up and die where no one would see him or find his corpse, to avoid seeing anyone mourn him. That was why Valeria was going to kill him herself when it got too bad—and yes, she would hide his body from Tir.
She didn’t want to upset him either. He was a good kid and good at murder. He had a promising future ahead of him.
“He’s been through too much,” Viktor complained, reluctantly separating himself from Valeria to go get his worn clothing. (She felt how cold her back was in his absence.) “I knew that Oppenheimer was going to act like a ripe bastard, but the poor guy sees all of the Generals as his uncles and aunties. Still, to do that to someone who knew him so well is beyond the pale.”
“He wasn’t just trying to kill Gremio,” Flik reminded him. “He was trying to kill all of us. Gremio was just in front."
“He has to be under Windy’s influence, like Kwanda was,” Valeria maintained. Flik had loudly disagreed with her about this, and Viktor had quietly disagreed, but she had known the Generals and they hadn’t. “It’s not just Tir that saw Milich as family. These are all people who went to holiday dinners together. Milich is Teo’s friend. He knew his wife. He was around when Tir was born. Gremio was only a ‘servant’ by title to these people; with Teo gone so often, he was his liaison in Gregminster—”
“—Being friendly with someone in peace means nothing in war,” Flik interrupted. “Especially not when it comes to imperials.”
Valeria smiled at him, a smile that showed her teeth. “I would argue with that more stringently, if I hadn’t broken several of my former friends on the walls of Pannu Yakuta last autumn.”
“…I don’t even like winning arguments with you,” Flik noted, and covered his face.
“You’re both pretty,” Viktor sighed, pulling his shirt over his head. “I’m going to go get it together and see if I can assess our intrepid leader’s mental state. I would prefer it if you were both still alive when I came back downstairs.”
“I’ll be fine,” Valeria told him, “but I make no promises for him.”
Viktor snorted. He briefly grabbed her waist as he passed by. “There you go, lass,” he said, and followed it up with a kiss.
Valeria couldn’t help but smile. There was something so enjoyable about Viktor. He acted like a bastard, but when you took stock of his actual actions, he did nothing but help and protect others. She thought there was something adorable about him, the way he hid in wolf’s clothing, talked a bigger game than he ever played, pretended to play both sides just to follow his heart every time anyway. He was comfortable, rough enough to handle harsh treatment but soft whenever he thought he could get away with it.
“By the way, Crazy,” he asked, “were you going to go up to serve up lunch with your tits out like that?”
He didn’t call her Jailbird anymore, for obvious reasons. She considered being called ‘Crazy’ an acceptable substitute.
“Tir wouldn’t even notice,” she responded, “and when it comes to a man that old, you have to give them something from time to time so they don’t just die in their sleep.”
Viktor laughed, slipping his arm back off of her as he went. Another thing that Valeria (of course) liked about him was that he genuinely thought she was a sight for sore eyes. Most would only notice the amount and size of the scars on her torso even if she did have her tits out (or, with reference to the scars, the tit and a half she still had).
“Play nice,” Viktor shouted behind him as he turned around the corner and away.
After a sigh, Valeria looked down at Flik. Flik, who had taken the time to pull his pants back up while Viktor was getting dressed, looked up to her. It was immediately apparent to both of them that they were not playing at all.
Valeria wouldn’t have counted it totally out of the question. Viktor had been there both times, but she had let him do it twice now. She enjoyed watching Viktor have him, and, as mentioned before, he was beautiful. At times, in brief moments, she could see what some considered so compelling about him. He did have a quality that drew people to him, the intensity of his gaze and the slightly unreasonable way he handled things, like he thought he deserved better, you deserved better, everyone deserved better, and he was going to pry better out of the jaws of the Empire if that was what it took to get it.
But she had spent much of her life serving domineering, attractive men, and those charms no longer compelled her.
“I’ve worked with plenty of men from the warrior tribes before, who thought they’d join the army,” she informed him. “Many of them couldn’t get along, largely because of their… old-fashioned opinions.”
Flik scoffed. “Because you’re a woman in command. I know.”
“Not just that,” she continued. “I heard your kind say things about men who lay down with their shield-brothers that I don’t think anyone from where I come from has said in centuries.”
“You bastard,” said Flik, sitting up. (She did appreciate that Flik accurately recognized that Valeria was a bastard, not a bitch, but he was still an idiot overall.) “I don’t have anything to do with that. I haven’t even been home in years. I didn’t leave for no reason.
“Besides, you don’t understand anything at all about Viktor, not really, or what he’s been through, or you wouldn’t say the shit you do to him. I’m not offended on my own account. I know I’m one of many for him. I’ve accepted that. You’ll have him back eventually, so just go away for now.”
The thing that Valeria thought was most charming about the situation, which came back to her as she stared down into Flik’s baby-blue eyes, was that Flik had no idea that Viktor was leaving her for him, or indeed that the day would soon come that he chose Flik above everyone and everything else. Viktor knew that already, though he was trying to delay the inevitable and give everyone else their due before the day came. Valeria knew it already. She thought that Tir knew it, that he would only keep Viktor by his side until the day came that Flik pulled him another direction. Mathiu knew it, and was scrambling to make sure Viktor wasn’t bearing as much of the army’s support structure as he had at first anymore. The only person who had no idea that Flik had Viktor in the palm of his right hand was Flik.
It was so precious that sometimes, she even felt warm about it herself. It didn’t make much sense, but she was used to these things making no sense at all. There was something that sometimes passed between the two of them that left her without words. She would steal pieces of it from Viktor’s lips. She prepared, even in the moment, to lose it, and to have in her hands only strange and lovely memories, no different from stealing warmth on the warpath, quiet in the storm.
So she had thought, before she realized they were all dying in Soniere. What a shame.
She heard herself chuckle. Flik asked, “and what’s funny?”
“What I was going to say was that I saw some of them do exactly the same thing. They would bluster about tradition and degeneracy until they were bent over by the man of their choice themselves. Most of them kept being assholes about it in public because they couldn’t admit they had been wrong. I was going to say that you’re not much like that at all. I’ve heard a lot of speeches about honor and duty from men who sounded like you, but they didn’t really mean it. You do. I think you would have deserted the army because you would have known you were better than us.”
Flik looked up at her, stunned.
“And I would have called you a pansy,” Valeria admitted with a sigh. “Live and learn. None of us chose where we would be born, or to whom. I only judge people by what they become.”
With that, she turned to leave. She left time for Flik to say something to her, but he didn’t.
She did find him aggravating. Normally, she didn’t think she would have said any of that to him. But what was the point? If they were all going to die in Soniere, what was she holding her tongue for?
—
The last time any of the three of them had eaten was days ago. They lay together, half-dressed, and in Valeria’s case, half-asleep. But in that between place, she became slowly aware that Viktor and Flik were talking to each other, and then, what it was they were saying.
“I’m serious,” Flik whispered. “I think he needs you. You need to stay with him.”
Viktor whispered, “I’m not eating a bite if you won’t.”
“I know. I thought it would be best if we all went at once. Maybe Kirkis is right, and he can wait it out. He’s built differently. But you’re the strongest, the best at getting through; you need to stay with Tir.”
“I’ll do anything I can do to help him if fate grants me more time,” Viktor responded, voice low, nearly reverent. “But asking me to save myself while you wither away is too much to ask.”
“You need to—”
“It’s too much to ask.”
“I’m asking you to do it for Tir.”
“For Tir. All of us are equally dead weight for him right now. What I want is for those two down there to wait until we’ve breathed our last, then come up and fix us up in a stew. Someone has to come here eventually. Even if it’s Oppenheimer himself, come to gloat. Maybe Tir’s magician will find us and whisk us away. But I don’t think you and I are making it, or poor old Val.”
“You wouldn’t even do this for her, would you?”
“I certainly can’t fight her on it.”
“I’m the one who’s dead weight,” said Flik, blunt, exhausted. “I led us into disaster at Scarleticia, and because of that and the strife I caused in the army we’re down here today. But you’ve been a force driving us along to victory the whole time. He needs you. I can tell how important you are to him.”
“Come on, Flik.”
“Really. There are so many people who need you. You have to make it out of here.”
Valeria was awake by that point. She didn’t show it. She kept her eyes shut, stayed facing away, and listened as Viktor, who was in the middle, turned around to kiss Flik.
“I’m not going to shut up,” Flik said, lower, quietly. “I want you to forget about me, and live.”
Viktor didn’t respond immediately. Valeria heard skin on skin, maybe his hand on Flik’s side, or maybe on his face, or maybe foreheads touching. “You want to join Odessa,” said Viktor quietly.
Flik didn’t respond.
After a while, Viktor said, “I’m too selfish for that. Either we go back to her together, or you don’t go anywhere at all.”
“I’m dead weight, Viktor.”
“You’re nothing of the kind. You made some mistakes. If we could only get out of here, we’d fix it. I know you wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. You learn, Flik; some people can’t, but you fuck up, you think, you learn. I knew you when you were a nineteen-year-old idiot, I know these things. Do you even realize how much better you are as the man you are now, how much you’ve improved?”
“I don’t think good men lead battles with thousands of casualties.”
“I think they do. All the time. I think good men lose every day. I think sometimes they lose entire wars, when their enemies are just too strong. And damn it, I thought we might have had this one. I thought the good guys would win. But sometimes, you’re good and you lose.
“Hey, don’t look at me like that.”
“Did you just call yourself a good guy?”
“I said don’t look at me like that,” Viktor complained. There was no fire in his voice. Actually, Valeria thought he was fighting back tears.
“Maybe I do want to go back to Odessa, maybe I don’t,” said Flik. “But I can’t let a good guy like you go like that.”
You fucking lout, Valeria thought, keeping her breath even and quiet. He’s in love with you.
If she had her way, the blue-eyed, baby-faced idiot would have died in the disastrous battle he had lost for the whole army, and then she would have dragged all of these very important men (sans idiot) back to the castle where they belonged, and they would have sent scouts out to scout like a real army. Maybe those scouts would have died, but they wouldn’t be facing the possibility of half of the upper command dying in the dark, clutching each other’s hands.
The good guys keep losing, she thought, clenching her teeth, because you keep being so good. What in the hells am I doing down here with you? Having sex with taken men to distract myself, getting pregnant so I don’t have to have a period, starving to death for some idiots. If I had just nodded and agreed with Kwanda’s plans for genocide, I would have at least died certain about what I was doing, and probably with a full stomach.
What would it take to get them out of there? If she could convince them to save their strength and forget her, she would. But she had nothing to work with now. They had settled on going down together to save Tir and that was how it was going to be.
She pretended to be just waking up. “Hell are you idiots going on about,” she slurred.
Viktor froze, and then turned around to kiss her hair. “Nothing, beautiful,” he said, his voice low, soft, nearly convincing.
“Keep it that way. I’m trying to die in my sleep over here.”
Viktor sighed. “Oh, Crazy.”
“You can hush up or I’ll speed the process along for you both.”
It wasn’t an empty threat. It might be merciful. In the silence, Valeria debated the merits of killing Flik and then herself. It might just do the trick; Viktor would likely then attach to Tir as hard as he could in his grief, which might mean that he would save himself.
She might. They had a few days left before she really had to make a choice.
—
They were wound together on the floor. Valeria kept feeling horribly dizzy, in waves; sometimes her vision blotted out. She did not feel the hunger as hunger anymore; it was instead like parts of her kept disappearing, leaving empty space behind, chunks of her torso or brain screwing up before slowly, painfully reappearing again.
She was straddling Flik, looming over him. He liked to be on the bottom, anyway. Viktor was at her side, holding her. She felt how his hands trembled.
She felt dizzy, and then she was tangled up between them, with the flags twisted all around her ankles. The only thing that was solid was Viktor at her back; the old bear, the good old bastard.
She found herself looking into Flik’s eyes, though she was not sure when she caught them. She realized, suddenly, that what she felt for her lover’s stupid partner was worse than disliking him as a rival. Rivals nothing. Viktor could have five stupid boyfriends and she wouldn’t care. She disliked him as a person, because he was such a sweetheart and such a baby and such an idiot, and she hadn’t been that naïve since she was nine years old, when he had gone through shit just as bad and was still such a sweetheart.
He thought she was just a worse person than he was, and she didn’t have a cognizant counterargument to that. Not being a good person had been something she was comfortable with before she had started starving to death in prison.
That was why she was so aggravated to find herself conspiring with him, their gaze held like snakes squaring off. She agreed with him completely. Viktor had to make it out of here. Tomorrow, she would have to kill Flik and then herself, though she had been hoping to find a way to avoid it. Somehow, silently, they agreed on this.
—
You’re kidding me, Valeria thought.
The light poured down the stairs from above. The massive door, whose mechanism had been broken, was being held up entirely by Humphrey Mintz. In a halo of daylight, Mathiu Silverberg crouched on the ground, peering into the darkness below. At his shoulder was Leknaat’s apprentice, his eyes wide, as the gravity of the situation seemed to settle even onto his light shoulders.
Tir was upstairs already, blinking in the light.
Valeria’s hand moved to her stomach, almost against her will, and wrapped around the thing she knew was inside.
She thought, You are fucking kidding me.
—
Original Note:
One of my exes called me ‘Hey, Crazy.’ I loved it. That was perfect. Unfortunately, she’s long out of my life, and it was the nickname that she used for me. I’d feel weird if anyone else did. So it goes.
I always assumed they were in Soniere a LONG time. It’s supposed to be Milich’s personal secret prison and not easy to find. Mathiu knows they’re there, but considering he takes the army, it must have taken him a long time to decide something was wrong, that he had to go find them, and to actually get over there. Communication isn't instantaneous, and their teleporters don't know the location either. So, because of that, over the years I’ve made an excruciatingly long list of headcanons based on things that could happen in Soniere and how that shakes out in the future. This is that.
Damn, I love Valeria. We're in Fliktor town after this though -u-
“FUCK’S SAKE,” snapped Flik, pounding both fists on the wall. The house was old; the windows rattled.
Viktor, standing in the doorway behind him, tossed his pack onto the nearest bed. “We all love a good visit home,” he said cheerfully.
Flik glared over his shoulder at Viktor, and glared harder when Viktor laughed.
Flik had been transparently not enjoying his visit home. They had come to that region to rally the troops that were scattered in the west, but the confirmation that Neclord was in the area had, of course, derailed the mission somewhat. No one disagreed with Viktor that they needed to take care of him first, Neclord was as much of a danger to the people of Toran as the Empire itself.
Under his skin, Viktor’s nerves were buzzing. He tried not to show it. He had freaked out enough people today and he didn’t need more to worry about as the day wound down.
Flik, however, was reacting to something entirely different.
He had told Viktor many times that the area of Toran he came from, a badlands occupied by loose confederations of tribes, was ‘backwards.’ Viktor didn’t like to hear people talking themselves down, but he couldn’t tell him he was wrong either. He wasn’t from the warrior tribes and Flik was. If Flik thought his culture was backwards, who was Viktor to say otherwise?
Now that they were there, Viktor saw the virtues Flik hadn’t mentioned: a culture ready to fight for what was good and defend against evil, generous hospitality, stunning textiles. He also saw why Flik was attacking masonry right now. The entire day had been a nearly non-stop onslaught of incredibly dense traditional rules and traditional hierarchy, and in that hierarchy, might was right, men were superior, and the strongest man was king. The in-group feeling was so intense that other tribes and even villages down the road were suspect; only the home could be trusted and the home was never to be questioned. Their readiness to single someone out for difference was remarkable; Viktor had never in his life heard a man suspected of homosexuality for drinking water the wrong way before, but truly, in life, one never stops seeing new things.
He watched Flik with new appreciation as he gave the wall one more good, solid smack. In retrospect, he had gone through his crash course in modern world values in mere months and had absolutely aced the test (civil life). Flik acted like the men he had grown up with; he was quick to anger, devoted to justice, and fiercely defensive of his own; he used the same expressions and had the same haughty tilt of his head when he examined something new. But he did not act like them at all. Viktor had never seen Flik treat his female colleagues and superiors with anything less than sincere respect, and he had certainly seen him…
Ah, he had seen him be pretty open-minded on matters of homosexuality as well.
Strictly while in Soniere Prison. Not since then. He hadn’t said a word about it since then.
They hadn’t said a word about it since then. There had been plenty of other things to do, like adjusting to eating food again, catching up with changes in the army, assaulting Scarleticia, and defeating Great General Teo, after which Viktor had spent a lot of his time with Tir. Most nights, though, he had still laid down to sleep next to Flik, but to sleep, exhausted and grateful just to be sleeping somewhere safe.
Flik took a long, steadying breath into his lungs. He let it out and then put one hand over his hot forehead. “I underestimated how long it would take me to lose my patience with these fucking barbarians,” he grumbled, his eyes closed and his cheeks flushed. “I thought I would last a few hours before I needed a break. It turns out that five minutes was too much.”
“Well. In the first five minutes we were here, we saw some borderline domestic abuse that was clearly considered right and proper by everyone around, so—”
Flik screamed and hit the wall again. Viktor covered his mouth to hide his smile as Flik bellowed “I HATE THIS PLACE.”
Viktor laughed. His shoulder bounced against the doorframe. “Everyone was so stunned you hadn’t visited sooner!”
“What would a person even visit for? To be told they’re doing everything wrong, have all of their choices insulted, and then have to sit through lecture after lecture on culture and history as if I didn’t literally grow up here and hadn’t just come to the conclusion on my own, using my rational faculties, that the culture is garbage?”
“If I said that, these guys would tear me to shreds.”
“They’d tear me to shreds too, because it doesn’t matter if you’re one of them. All that matters is tradition. Good thing that a good murder is considered traditional if your honor has been insulted, because I would say my honor is feeling pretty insulted at this point,” he ranted, pacing in little circles.
“From a purely logistical standpoint, I would say that murdering your own village elder would be a bad thing for the Liberation Army.”
“FUCK,” snarled Flik, because he would do anything for the Liberation Army.
“You know, Cleo and Kasumi are taking this better than you are!”
Flik sighed, and, while pacing, pulling his hands down his face, he visibly cooled down a little. “I know. I know. They’re both champions. Kasumi could kick the ass of every idiot in here one after the other and they have no idea. They will never have an idea, because she’s such a class act, and she’ll let them go on each individually believing they’re the biggest man in the world. Thank God we didn’t bring Valeria, she would have killed someone by now.”
“I think this is why Valeria refused to come,” Viktor realized.
“I bet so, she told me that she had dealt with warriors before and has a low opinion of us. I just wonder why,” he complained sarcastically, dropping roughly onto one of the beds.
The little guest-room had two small beds. It was meant for all the gentlemen, which was them, Tir, and Pahn, who were both still talking with the village elder in the frontroom. The other guest room was meant for the ladies. Neither was using it; Cleo was sitting with Pahn and would surely go to bed with him in their room anyway, and Kasumi had promptly melted into the shadows, as she did. She would likely sleep on the roof, or in a nearby tree, or on the porch outside as she watched over Tir. She did things like that. Flik, however, had been clearly unable to stand listening to the elder’s view of his own history for one fucking second longer, so Viktor had quietly excused them both.
“Is that what she said?” Viktor asked.
“Oh, no, it was something more like, ‘I’ve handled men like you before, you ain’t shit, but I guess the Empire ain’t shit either,’ so on. Her conclusion was that we are all bad.”
“Of course it was.”
Flik stood back up. Thirty seconds had been too much relaxation for him. “Well, we are mercenaries,” he mused, crossing his arms and tapping one booted heel, a pose that it turned out came directly from the chest-puffing men outside, “and she is a deserter and a traitor. If you were a judge, you’d be splitting hairs to decide who’s worse.”
“Her, obviously. We have been exactly what and who we said we were at the start. Thieving mercenaries.”
“Oh, no, I won’t let you get away with that,” said Flik, a smile flickering onto his face as he looked over to him. “When was the last time you stole, swindled, or cheated anything? When was the last time you did anything that wasn’t purely in the interests of the Liberation?”
“Hey, the Liberation purchased me fair and square. They keep giving me war bounty, too. For as long as I’m doing strictly what I am paid to do, I am still a paragon of mercenary motives.”
“‘Strictly what you’re paid to do,’ come off it. You’re barely holding back ‘good job, buddy’ and ‘I love you, son’ every time Tir does anything.”
“Uncalled for.”
“Has he slipped up and called you ‘dad’ yet?”
“Come on, we just killed his dad.”
“No, he did that.”
“I was given the opportunity. Maybe I should have taken it.”
“But you didn’t, Viktor,” said Flik, tilting his head back, looking adorably smug, “because you knew it was the right thing to do, despite your orders. Not very mercenary.”
“Was it? He’s not been looking too steady since he bashed his dad’s skull in.”
Faced with a moral quandary, which was not exactly his strong suit, Flik opened his arms and shrugged. Again, the characteristic, snappy gesture had a certain flair that Viktor now saw was influenced by the bombastic, forceful men of the village around them, though he now knew he would never point that out. “Would he have liked watching someone else do it better?”
“There was probably no best course of action for that one,” Viktor reluctantly admitted. “I was for knocking him out and keeping him in the dungeon, but I don’t know if that would have been fun either.”
“That would have been the right way to get General Shulen on our ass immediately, and when we were not at all prepared for it,” Flik argued. “I’m hoping we face Kasim first, because the only way I can see us taking down the navy is if they’re alone and cornered. No, we did what we had to do, make no mistake, it was just an awful thing to do.”
“You’re the one who’s a mercenary,” Viktor teased. “I’m just the big guy who stands behind you.”
Flik sighed and, with more finality, sat down on the bed. “I’d rather be that than one of the assholes from here,” he groused.
It seemed like Viktor might be allowed to use the room himself now. He walked in and sat on the opposite bed to unlace his boots. “It’s different when it’s your hometown,” he started. “You know that I consider hating your own to be a heavenly right. But you’re saying things that I know you wouldn’t say about anyone else.”
“No, because those places aren’t terrible.”
Viktor laughed and popped off one boot. “Go on.”
“I’m serious. Yes, I’m thankful for some of the things I was taught. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of being trained to fight from a young age. I was taught to be self-sufficient but stand up for my brothers-in-arms. Food, music, clothing, all of that, sure, fine.”
“Music’s pretty good, actually. Good rhythm.”
“Fine, whatever. But underneath the surface stuff is a way of thinking that’s just awful. It makes you hate yourself and everyone around you. We really are taught to see everyone as a potential enemy, as a threat; unless she’s a woman, and then she’s a possession. It turns everyone into assholes by the time they’re twelve. I remember being kids, and being friends with everyone; then, suddenly, we couldn’t be. We were all supposed to be fighting each other and only coming together if we found a bigger enemy. I hated it. I fight for Toran because I like it there, Viktor. As far as I’m concerned, this place can go back to being squabbling tribes on the frontier who exterminate each other for fun.”
“You don’t think the people here deserve better?”
Flik sighed expressively. “Maybe. In theory. If they want better. I think a lot of the girls deserve better, but don’t be too precious with them either. Most of them participate just as much as the men do. They tear apart other girls and insist on the men around them being strict and tough. I couldn’t take it. I was trying to court someone before I left, but I felt like she didn’t know who I was, even though we spent a lot of time together. There was a man she expected me to be and I wasn’t him.”
After a moment, Viktor replied, “Well, it’s a good thing there’s a way out for people who don’t fit in.”
“Not that it was easy. Fucking off and never coming back means you’re staring your new life with nothing. But I think the thing that really bothers me is that I know if I had brought Odessa here to meet everyone, they wouldn’t have treated her with the respect she deserved. She did say she wanted to see my home, one day, but I put it off. I knew they would have treated her terribly, just because they couldn’t see her as a person. They wouldn’t be able to see who she is, her actual qualities. Now she’s gone, and it still wouldn’t make any difference to them, how she lived or how brave and strong she was or what she died for. They’ll never…”
He broke off. He had slowly leaned forward, and now his head hung over his knees, braced by one arm.
Viktor stifled an unfair jealousy. It wasn’t fair that Flik had a hometown to hate while Viktor had no hometown left at all, but it wasn’t Flik’s fault, either. He wasn’t going to interrupt with his own sob story when Flik’s grief was so present and raw.
Especially because he really didn’t want to think about that sob story at present.
In a way, Flik had lost his homeland too, since he had lost all of his love for it. That couldn’t be easy either. “Plenty of people loved and respected her in life,” he said, eyes down, focusing on stripping off his gloves and bracers, the half-armor on his shoulders. “It’s their loss.”
“You have to play by their rules,” said Flik tersely. “We can convince them to respect Tir. It’s probably better that I didn’t even have to try to fight that fight.”
Flik’s gaze, however, still looked hollow. Viktor knew he wanted to fight that fight, and, moreover, regretted not trying before. He had badly wanted to make them respect Odessa, had probably imagined a hundred ways he would reconcile himself and his hometown, found ways to be able to love both them and Odessa, if only he had dared.
Some things could not be changed by stubbornness. Flik was one of those things himself. “You’ll always wish you could be with her,” said Viktor, though maybe he shouldn’t have. “You’re putting everything you’ve got into the cause on her behalf, even though you talk about mercenary motivations. I don’t want you to die for the cause, but I don’t know if I can stop you.”
Flik looked at him. There was a darkness in his eyes, swimming behind the bright blue, chasing. For a moment, he didn’t find anything to say.
Then, just as Viktor has, he deflected his gaze and focused it on untying the leather armor from his wrists, his forearms. “I wonder myself,” he admitted, quietly. “You know, I was taught death in battle is a glorious thing. The best way to die. And I can’t help thinking that if I do die, I might be with her again.”
He paused, his nails tangled in leather laces. “But I can’t do it dishonestly either, you know? I can’t be trying to die. She wouldn’t like that. If I fall, it has to be after I’ve put everything I’ve got in. I don’t know if you’d call that suicidal or not. Sometimes I think, just from being unfaithful to her…”
Flik fell silent.
Viktor didn’t move. Somewhere in the house, a wooden cog-clock struck a late hour. Its clatters and chimes rose and fell.
Odessa had absolutely been aware that Viktor had eyes for her lover. Back then, he hadn’t been taking it too seriously. He had teased her, a time or two, told her to keep a close grip on her pretty boy, or else ‘someone’ might snatch him away. She had teased him right back. Viktor thought she knew, in the end, that she had known long before Viktor did that he was suppressing more serious feelings for their shared favorite barbarian out of love for her. He remembered her saying, once, that she didn’t ‘keep’ anyone; she wanted a world where everyone was free to follow their heart. “Just like Toran,” she had said. “If we have to force her to be what we want her to be, then we haven’t helped her at all.”
And yet, you’ll keep him forever, Viktor thought, quietly. He couldn’t even be bitter. It was true, as factual as a mountain in his path. There was no way around it. If I’d been just a little faster, Odessa, you’d still be with us; we would never have done what we’ve done and I wouldn’t be thinking these things.
“I don’t know how to make the world she saw,” Flik said quietly. “Anymore, I don’t even know how to see it myself. I suppose that’s why we have Tir doing these things.”
Viktor swept his hair back with a hand, grit his teeth, and pushed down his emotions. “Tir is able to see many things the rest of us cannot.”
“Maybe a few too many.”
“I have to talk to him about the difference between ‘mystical visions’ and ‘plans’ again for sure.”
“I kind of wish he would stop being right about the mystical visions,” Flik admitted. “It’s aggravating.”
Viktor snorted. “Sorry that the black magician we chose to command the army genuinely sees the future with his dark and sinister powers.”
“This is why people think we’re the bad guys.”
“He just looks bad. Objectively.”
“I’m sure having a pack of mercenaries behind him doesn’t help.”
“He’s said over and over that he likes having us around. At this point we have to believe him.”
Flik hummed. He closed his eyes and gently rolled his neck. The armor, half-peeled from his arms and torso, looked like a skin he was shedding. He set back in to work on taking it all off, saying, “I hated being called a mercenary at first, but now I think it’s more honest work than any other kind of soldier or guard I’ve seen. Not many people fight for what they say they’re fighting for; I know you are.”
“Better than one of those assholes out there, right?” Viktor teased.
“Motherfucker,” Flik snapped, and stripped himself entirely of his armor. “God, yes. I am so tired of their shit and I’ve barely been back for a day.”
Beneath those tight leathers, his blue shirt was sweat-soaked and his skin was dirty. That was what happened on scouting missions; they had had little time to rest, and Flik didn’t relax and clean up even when he had time to.
The skin beneath the dirt flushed at the touch of the cold night air hissing in from the open window. Viktor would never be shy about looking, no matter how fraught a situation was. He maintained and would argue to death that looking didn’t do anyone harm. He thought Flik did catch him, though, so he quickly said, “Don’t let them get you down. You’re out; you’re not caught up back in their world just because you’ll be here for a day.”
Flik paused. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just a day. It only feels so dire because I’m here right now.”
“That’s it.”
After another moment, a new expression crossed Flik’s face. There was a glimmer in his eyes, suddenly, something indefinable which made the hair rise on the back of Viktor’s neck. “I haven’t followed their rules in years. I’m not going to now.”
“You’re your own man.”
“Exactly,” he said, and stood up from the bed. As he stood, he grabbed the shirt, which was only about halfway tucked into his trousers, and pulled it over his head. The undershirt went with it, leaving a grimy, partly bandaged torso behind. Thinner than it used to be, with him still bulking back up after Soniere, but firm with a hard-set toughness and beautiful all the same. He threw the shirt behind him onto the bed, and then began to approach Viktor. “I know who they want me to be, but one day back isn’t going to accomplish that. Years wouldn’t.”
Viktor swallowed. He found himself fundamentally doubting what was happening. The conversation they had just had was sitting heavy in his gut. “Where are you going with this?
Flik said, “they wanted me to be backwards, stupid and hateful, and afraid of my fellow man; I am going to be better than that whether they like it or not.” And, putting one firm hand on Viktor’s chest, with one fluid motion he climbed onto his lap.
It was an honestly impressive display of finesse and bodily control. It also wasn’t sitting right with Viktor. He wavered; Flik put his other hand on his shoulder, and it was warm, roughly calloused, and his fingers slipped over the ridge of his scapula.
“Are you… sure?” he asked.
Flik leaned forward and put their lips together. For a moment, Viktor didn’t move. He made Flik press in again, tilting his head.
Viktor put a hand on Flik’s waist to balance him. He forgot, for a moment; he let the heat of Flik’s breath rise up to him, like a warm wave climbing the shore. But then, softly, firmly, he pushed him back.
Flik looked down at him. The room was dark except for the moon coming in through the window, bright, but draining.
Viktor didn’t really want to stop him because, on the one hand, he didn’t really want to know the truth. And yet that weight remained in his stomach, and it would remain, getting heavier, and heavier still, the longer he carried it. He had lived long enough now that it was harder to be deluded; he didn’t have the strength he once did to keep up under the lies. Still, he had to clear his throat before saying, “Not a minute ago, you were saying something about being unfaithful to Odessa.”
“Yes,” said Flik. His eyes traced down for a moment, taking the moonlight in swordlike whirls. “I—”
“If you’ll regret it, then I won’t—”
“Oh, not with you!”
“What?”
“With Valeria, not you. Unfaithful, with you, that doesn’t make sense—”
“What do you mean?” He couldn’t possibly think that Viktor just didn’t count? If so…
“I couldn’t—she asked me to follow my heart, and—”
“Flik, what the fuck do you mean?”
“I mean I didn’t follow my heart. I don’t love Valeria. I don’t even like her. But I—” he said, and then his mouth stopped entirely, frozen between one word and the next. His eyes grew wide, for a moment, and then he flushed. Suddenly, he couldn’t meet Viktor’s eyes.
Viktor felt a little flustered himself. There were one or two too many ways he could have finished that sentence, but— But. “I shouldn’t have asked you to do that with her,” he said, dodging the issue. “It wasn’t right.”
“No, I—well, I could have said no. I thought we were all going to die at the time. I didn’t think it mattered. That time already feels… like somewhere else.”
It did. It was like he had experienced Soniere Prison somewhere other than his mind, some other lightless room in his guts or his spine, and could only feel it as creeping dread, spikes of fear, crawling numbness, not with actual thoughts. If someone in the prison had started eating corpses or stabbing themself, he wouldn’t have thought any worse of them. “Still—”
“Oh, leave it. I made a mistake, I should have known better. I’ve talked to Odessa about it, though I know that makes me sound insane. I wouldn’t touch someone like Valeria again, but—”
But. Flik looked away again, out the window. The white light touched his red cheek.
“She’s not really that bad,” Viktor said.
“Of course, you think—”
“Really. I won’t betray her confidence by telling you everything she told me, but she knows what she does, and she does it for a reason. She was Kwanda’s lieutenant for a long time, and her advancement in the army wasn’t exactly easy. It’s not just these assholes who aren’t nice to women in command. She’s become the person she is for a reason.”
“Talk about your girlfriend some other time,” Flik complained.
“Right,” said Viktor, and leaned in a little closer to the man perched on his lap. He put both hands on his waist; Flik’s skin was cooling rapidly, so he felt him shudder at the warm touch. “Did you ‘talk to Odessa’ about me, too?” he asked.
“Why would I have to?” Flik asked, turning to face him again. “She was very fond of you, you know.”
“I do know. She was… free with her love.”
“Viktor.”
“Ha ha. She told you that you couldn’t do this with anyone you didn’t like a lot?...”
“Stop being an asshole,” Flik whispered, and kissed him.
For a second, they were nearly still against each other. Then Viktor pulled him in, sliding him up his thighs. Flik opened his mouth, which was sweet and sharp with wine and the fennel and mint from their dinner. Viktor pursued its opening and Flik let him in.
His thoughts grew dim as he wrapped himself in the heat of Flik’s mouth, so much more flushed than his cold skin. Flik had gotten jumpy in the interrogation. He twisted and turned on his lap as they kissed. Viktor leaned back to give him more space, and Flik parted his thighs over him to balance on the bed. Soniere had just happened, but it had happened years ago; Viktor felt a dizzying relief wash over him when Flik pressed into him.
He moved around Viktor’s teeth, never fully capitulating to his domineering. He turned his head, and lifted a hand to tug on Viktor’s ear, thread into his hair. Another one grabbed thoughtlessly at his side, at his shirt, not trying to get anywhere, only feeling. They kissed until they heard the sound of someone setting down a cup and a plate in the front room, the sharp clatter cutting through the hush of the night.
Flik leaned back, then turned off of Viktor’s lap and onto the bed. “Close the door,” he whispered.
Viktor got up and did as he was told, closing it firmly but not sliding the bolt into place. As he faced Flik again, he pulled off his own sweaty shirt, and hypocritically said, “Tir and Pahn are supposed to sleep here too, you know.”
“The elder can talk all night,” Flik said, taking off his headband and ruffling his hair.
Viktor began to walk back to the bed. “Should I shut the window?”
“No.”
“Anyone could hear you.”
“Let them all hear me,” he said, sitting back, grinning. “They’re so terrified of it, they might get nightmares. Maybe that’ll actually toughen them up.”
Viktor couldn’t help laughing. He climbed onto the bed, and immediately, Flik came to him. He put his hands on Viktor’s shoulders, both bracing and embracing.
Near his face, Viktor said, “So you’re just going to use me for your little moment of rebellion?”
“Little moment of rebellion?” Flik asked, eyes shining bright. “We’re taking down the empire.”
He kissed his mouth, close, hot, brief. Then he kissed his cheekbone, the side of his face, the soft skin under his ear. Viktor drew him in with his hands on both of his hips, seizing him like a horse that might run away. Flik only pressed in.
Viktor felt, for a moment, weak, as Flik kissed the curve of his head, the side of his head. He leaned into the weakness and fell forward, insistently pushing Flik beneath him.
Flik ground a hand into Viktor’s hair and another onto the soft skin in the small of his back. He said his name, and clutched him, and spread his own thighs open.
God, he was right. Viktor didn’t know a single man as strong as Flik, firm and unbending in his convictions, as certain, nearly fanatical in his dedication, or as beautiful. He was stunned they didn’t all burn in front of him, sometimes. Flik had told him, once, that he had not been able to use runes at all in his youth. Everyone had assumed he was just the kind of person with no talent for it. Then one day he was struck by lightning while out in a storm, roughhousing, being stupid, showing off to his friends. It had baked him; that was why he had a light streak in his hair, white lines mapping his skin. He hadn’t been able to hear or see for three days. Then the hearing came back, then his sight, and proper control over his hands; and then, restless and needing to face his new fear, Flik had picked up a lightning rune and discovered that the immolating strike had unlocked magic in him. Now everyone who tried to break him down smelled the same scent of fear in the air the split second before the same heavenly bolt struck them down, and all before Viktor could even swing his sword over his shoulder, blinded by the searing light.
—
Original Note:
…The lightning strike thing is a headcanon, but it fucking works, right? Anyone can use a rune, so you would think he got that nickname for a reason. It could explain the light streak in his hair, too. Let me live a little.
The idea that the Warriors Village (which I write as several feuding tribes instead, because I like my fantasy societies being actual societies) is a paradise for big old bigots follows from the way they—uh—treat women. There’s nothing overtly racist or homophobic out of them in the game, but these things usually go together. I think it adds a little extra something to Flik’s backstory if he’s from a really regressive and repressive environment and comes to fight for equality and freedom. In summary I love my boy.
FWIW I always felt like despite their other crimes the Scarlet Moon was not big on homophobia. Maybe homophobia light, they are an empire and all, but I don’t have an explanation for Milich’s position and popularity if gay is strictly not okay with them.
Tir always seemed weighed down, now.
Viktor couldn’t blame him. The army was energized by the knowledge that four of the five Great Generals were now around the table planning how to conquer the fifth, who stood alone against them. Many were starting to believe that the end of the war was in sight.
But the end of the war did not offer Tir anything except rest. It wouldn’t change anything. Viktor knew he was wondering what kind of life he would have after the war; who, if anyone, he would have left to spend it with.
Asking him to stay strong for the rest of them and fake it until the war was over was brutal. It was barbaric. It was how war was done. Viktor got onto one knee and took Tir’s chin in one hand and asked him to stay strong anyway.
“I will,” he said, softly, pushing Viktor’s hand away. “I’ll see it out until then. Everyone deserves it. Toran deserves it. You deserve it. We’ll cut out the worst of the Empire and make space for a new country. I just don’t know if I see myself in it.”
“If you have to go, then go,” Viktor said. “Go wherever you like. But live through it, for me. I won’t forgive myself if the war we started ends your life too.”
Tir looked down at him with a piercing quality in his gaze that Viktor swears he didn’t have in him only a month ago. Tir had changed quickly, so quickly that his young, unaltered face had become unsettling to those who didn’t know him well. “Just like you will,” he said. “You’ll survive the war, but I won’t see you again. You’ll win and then disappear. I can tell.”
When Tir said it, Viktor knew he was completely right; Viktor had known that was his plan himself, but had covered it, like furniture draped with a sheet, so that he couldn’t see it. Of course he was planning to leave Toran and everyone in it, including Tir; that was what he did. “I never overstay my welcome,” he responded with a smile. “Besides, this isn’t me. I’m a mercenary, not a hero. I can only act the part for so long.”
Tir gave him a fleeting, distracted smile. “It’s the same for me, I think.”
“Sorry, Tir,” Viktor smiled, “you actually are a hero.”
“Oh, stand up.”
Viktor complied. Tir was a very short man. He had to glare up at Viktor once he stood, yet Viktor really didn’t feel any bigger than him.
“Fate picks out heroes like game tiles,” he said, looking up, “the stars put us into place. We don’t really have a say in it. A hero isn’t a kind of person, I don’t think, just a person put into the hero’s place. But I think I will move out of that place when I return to the Palace of Gregminster, where I was first put into it. It’s the same for you. We’ll just have to make sure we walk out of different doors, then.”
Viktor couldn’t even pretend that wasn’t eerie. Just as he became more weighed down, Tir had started drifting more, like he was being pulled more and more out of himself, into the starry sky he watched at night. Some said it was the influence of his rune, some argued it was simply normal for a magician of his caliber. “You have to get away from Leknaat’s sneak, man. He’s a bad influence on you.”
Tir laughed a little laugh. “I promise that you cannot be as aggravated about my perspective on esoterica as Luc is.”
“Viki, then. Whoever is filling your head with this fate junk.”
“Oh, that can’t be helped,” said Tir vaguely. Despite himself, and for no reason Viktor knew, he found his eyes suddenly snapping to the rune on Tir’s hand. He felt uneasy, the kind of uneasy that told him there were eyes on him, though he hadn’t seen the hunter yet. “Don’t worry, Viktor. I’ll see it through to the end. You've been jumpy since we got you back from Moravia.”
“Can you blame me? That’s the second time I’ve had to whiteknuckle my way through being a prisoner of war in the past year,” Viktor complained, and, honestly, though he tried to take the matter lightly he was…
Well, he spent a lot of his time outside and under the open sky these days.
“That’s true,” Tir mused, vacant again. “I almost wish I remembered Soniere better. I’m sorry, I…”
“No you don’t,” Viktor assured him quickly. “You were in another world for most of that, and you should be thankful. It was bad. What you don’t remember is just a month and a half of bad things. Good for you.”
“Couldn’t have been all bad. That’s when you got Flik back,” said Tir, with way, way too much of a cheeky grin.
“Alright, you’re feeling better, mission accomplished,” Viktor groused. He messed up Tir’s hair before leaving, one last, parting laugh ringing down the hall.
—
Sylvina shrieked when Viktor hoisted her into his arms and swung her around. Rubi stood, but seeing that Kirkis was still sitting back, perfectly relaxed, he settled down.
“Congratulations!” Viktor roared. Sylvina laughed, and then laughed harder when he plunked her down on Kirkis’ lap. “To both of you, of course!”
“So you heard,” Kirkis noted.
“Just this morning. I’m so happy for you two.”
“Do you think that maybe you shouldn’t swing a pregnant woman around in the air?”
Viktor waved his hand and said “I’ll stop once I can see it. Until then she’s just got a little bit of something in her.”
“I think even if Viktor threw me around, somehow, he wouldn’t hurt the baby,” Sylvina smiled.
“Of course not!”
“That’s how you know he isn’t a very good mercenary,” whispered Kirkis to Sylvina, conspiratorially. “No children, no women, no elders.”
“Hey. Those are normal boundaries. Who doesn’t draw the line at kids and grandmas?”
Both Kirkis and Sylvina immediately gestured to Rubi, who looked up unblinking.
Viktor hummed in his throat.
“Anyway, thank you,” said Kirkis. “It really won’t affect her for another season or two. With luck we should be settled into a home of our own by the time she’s even feeling it.”
“You’re really doing that?” Viktor asked.
“A home in the capital? Yes. Provided we leave enough of Gregminster for people to live in. I want to be a part of the new country we’re making,” Kirkis said seriously, tipping Sylvina off of his lap and onto her feet. “Not apart from it, in an enclave. For me, and for whatever elves are out there. I want our future to be as part of the world around us.”
“You’re going to get hell for it.”
“I know. I’m sure many will still choose isolation. But if no one paves the road, no one else has the chance to walk on it.”
“Good luck,” Viktor said, crossing his arms. “You’ll have to be stubborn as a sheepdog. Let us know if you need anything.”
“I will.”
Though, in his heart, Viktor was no longer sure who ‘us’ was, or if it included him. He was starting to formulate his guesses for who would be running Gregminster when all was said and done, but there were certainly still questions to be answered. “It’s so strange to think that, if we pull this off, that child will never know the Empire.”
“Strange, but good,” Kirkis said.
“We’ll teach them about what came before,” said Sylvina, “but we want them to be a child of the new world.”
Viktor shook his head, smiling. “You sweet little cupcakes.”
“What about you, Viktor?” Sylvina asked.
“What about me?”
Sylvina and Kirkis looked at each other. Then, Kirkis said, “Well, you may well have one of your own. Sylvina and I know that it must have been… well, we had been much more cautious before we ended up underground. It is possible…”
Viktor laughed, and shook his head. “Oh, I get it. No, no. Thank the Stars, no. Val told me when we first got together that she can’t get pregnant. No one has had to call the Bear his old man yet and that dark day isn’t coming any time soon.”
“Oh, I see,” Sylvina said.
“I was worried it hadn’t occurred to you,” admitted Kirkis.
“What kind of idiot do you think I am? I wouldn’t be acting the way I do if I thought I had a baby on the way.” Not at all. He wouldn’t even be entertaining the selfish thoughts he was having, the wave-like dreams of wandering.
…Besides, he’d have to worry about it maybe being Filk’s, too. That wasn’t even worth thinking about.
—
Like he said, Viktor preferred to spend his time in open air these days. In Toran castle, which only really had solid walls in about half of its design, that was simple. The outer walls (and some of the inner) had wide, open windows that let in the crash of the lake’s waves, the calls of birds and deer from untamed Toran island. The shore was always dotted with people, eating, mingling, training, forging weapons, carousing, loading and unloading ships from shore; the outlying towers were open to the breeze on all their upper floors. One place he found himself spending more and more time was the north tower, where, by being claimed early by Kwanda, over time and with inertia most of the Scarlet Moon’s former upper command had gathered.
Viktor made his way to them to see how Kasim’s forces were getting along. The north tower was bustling with activity at all hours. The old empire officers were too used to being in the thick of it and didn’t like to be exiled to the shore of the island or camped around Kaku like the civilian militiamen. In the afternoon the terraces of the tower were so packed with drinking, gambling, and socializing he was worried about people falling off the edge. He had to shout to be heard and was practically crawling around tables to get through, until he reached the top terrace, which Oppenheimer has claimed to his own, and his eyes were inevitably drawn to a brighter red amongst the roses.
Valeria sat back at a table, in a red dress, with her hair tied back with a red velvet ribbon to keep her curls off of her neck. She had a fan of cards in one hand, a cup of something sweating through her fingers in the other, and a cool, confident smile on her face. There were four men at the table with her and they all looked considerably more nervous than she did.
One, to his lack of surprise, was Kwanda Rosman, ‘incognito’. He was out of armor and wore no insignia, but a man with his scars and conspicuous, incredible size could only be so incognito. He leaned back, tapping one booted heel on the ground and examining his hand of cards with displeasure.
Next to him was a man he vaguely recognized as another one of Kwanda’s staff, a man Valeria would have worked closely with in her time as Kwanda’s lieutenant. Next to him, to Viktor’s amusement, were Teo McDohl’s stuffy and palpably bitter guards, Alen and Grenseal, who would defend Tir to the death but would watch any other man in the building die on the ground without lifting a finger. They both glared at Viktor as he approached. Valeria snapped her eyes to him and back, but it was Kwanda who said something.
“There’s the hired blade who has just a little too much control over our lives!” he boomed pleasantly. He stood up and barely had to reach his hand across the table to clear it. Viktor clasped it and pulled out a chair to sit himself down next to Valeria.
“That’s me,” he grinned.
“Isn't it so convenient you’re knocking boots with him, Val?” Kwanda laughed as he returned to place himself.
“Isn’t it,” she agreed coolly. She was amused; she was mostly focused on the game. Viktor recognized it as a variant of a gambling game that had always been popular among the rank and file. He doubted they were betting real money. That wasn’t the army’s favorite currency, anyway. It was prestige, bragging rights, status. They had carried over their hierarchy from Gregminster nearly intact to Toran, though it had to be enforced in other ways.
Valeria was an absolute champion at that game, both the cards and the power politics associated with it. Her ability to somehow always be connected to upper command, her combat prowess, her unflappability in conversation, her skill in a simple gambling game all reflected each other and all signaled to the men around the table that she was almost certainly going to outrank all of them in the new world they were setting up.
How, they were surely asking themselves, struggling to come up with as good a position even after having been dealt better hands and given more opportunities. How does she do it? But how could she fail? She was a jack of all trades, adaptable to any situation. No one had blended prestige in the old regime with cachet in the new order as smoothly as she had. Anything at all could happen to the country in the future and she would surely be fine.
“Deal me into the next one,” Viktor said as he sat down. “Maybe I can take the heat off for some of you.”
Kwanda made a scoffing noise and threw up his palm to indicate it was hopeless for him. Alen, the dark-haired guard—Viktor knew he had been born a commoner and rose through the ranks to General Teo’s side honestly—gave Viktor an arch-browed look. “False humility isn’t going to work. I’ll be damned if you’re anything but a complete card shark.”
“What!” Viktor exclaimed, unable to keep a bit of a smile off. “I assure you, I’m an idiot with these. I can barely add up the numbers.”
“Sure.”
“They’re not falling for it,” Valeria said.
“It’s not a trick!”
“Everyone knows you too well now,” she continued. “Deal him in next round, he’ll get second or third place depending on the feel of the table, he’s mostly listening to how everyone else is doing.”
“Unbelievable,” Viktor complained. She was right. He was planning to get a middling result while he observed the actual dynamics at the table. He hated to lose as much as the next man, but winning too much got you too much attention.
He wanted Valeria to win, anyway.
They finished the round they were on. Valeria won, Kwanda was in last. A few tokens with nothing behind them were thrown around the table and Viktor was absorbed into the game.
As far as he could tell, no one was really teamed up or really against each other. It was a boiling hot day and they were playing to keep their minds off of the discomfort and fill up the time between assault and siege. Still, Valeria was quick, sharp, and ready with winning moves, and he noticed Alen and Grenseal seemed to casually, perhaps subconsciously, play to each other’s advantage. He thought Kwanda was losing mostly because he didn’t want to put energy into beating former subordinates, which was clever of him if he was.
Kwanda seemed to have fully absorbed a role as a general of middling importance in the Liberation Army, but Viktor still didn’t have a great read on his motivations and likely never would. Since he was stronger than he was sharp, Viktor suspected it was initially the love of his followers that had gotten him so far. That love was, though not fully shattered, fairly fractured now. Windy had been having him act a bastard.
Oh, well. If he didn’t snap under the pressure and turn traitor, then he wasn’t Viktor’s problem. Valeria assured him Kwanda was under control and he trusted her judgement there.
A few rounds in, Viktor had himself in a middling position, where he wanted to be. He kept swapping positions with Teo’s guards, who were clever but cautious. He knew Tir was fond of them as well and trusted them completely; he decided to stir the pot a little.
“You know that you two are supposed to be playing against each other, right?” he teased, after a sip of Val’s drink (it was hard liquor, heavily iced). He had his arm behind Valeria, now, resting over her shoulders. “You can’t be showing each other your cards.”
Grenseal glanced over, placid. “We’re not.”
“Neither can you and the lieutenant,” said Alen, for his part.
“Oh, careful,” said Viktor, with a faux-nervous glance at Valeria. “If she thinks you’re accusing her of cheating—”
“I know full well he’s accusing you of cheating, not me,” Valeria interrupted confidently.
“Eh? Why would that be the case?”
Valeria didn’t even bother to reply except with a good-natured scoff.
Viktor grinned and leaned into her a little. “Fully subconscious, then,” he said, nodding over to the two guards. “They don’t even know they’re doing it.”
“Doing what?” Alen asked.
“Stop,” sighed Valeria. She was smiling.
“Eh, do you think?...”
“What are you talking about?” asked Grenseal. Unlike his partner, he was so easy-going and levelheaded it was almost suspicious. He was just a little too easy to talk to for Viktor’s comfort. He was sure that he had done a lot of the mingling, talking, and information gathering for notoriously stoic Teo.
“I mean, are you two an item?” he asked.
Valeria rolled her eyes. The two guards looked at each other, nonplussed but not offended.
“Does it come off that way?” Grenseal asked.
“No, and I’m not sure why you think that either,” said Alen, sounding annoyed. “We’ve been working together for a long time, but I don’t think I do anything outside the bounds of professional relationship here.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Valeria said, and put down what was probably a winning hand while everyone was distracted. “His hobby is getting people riled up and off-guard. Whatever you do, don’t spend time worrying about this tonight. That’s how he wins.”
“You always make things so confrontational,” Viktor said to her, affecting being wounded. “You make everything a competition.”
“That’s how I keep winning.”
“Shit,” said Kwanda, “I think she’s won again.”
Everyone observed the cards on the table with varying levels of incredulity. Kwanda’s other officer sighed, shook his head, and began gathering the cards to deal.
Really, Viktor didn’t think the two guards were a couple. He had been more interested in their reaction to the suggestion. In his experience, higher-ups in the Scarlet Moon tended to be perturbed by the idea of male relationships without committing to proper hatred. Milich Oppenheimer wouldn’t have risen to the top in an environment as hateful as Flik’s homeland, but it wasn’t an even playing field either. If the two had taken the suggestion badly, he would have considered what that meant for Teo and his household. The fact that they didn’t seem to care was actually less surprising—uniformly, anyone they had poached from Teo’s crew seemed to regard these matters as just unimportant, secondary, like everything else, to their myopic view on the war effort.
No one even took an easy shot at Viktor’s well-known personal predilections as the next hand was dealt out. ‘You’re seeing the stuff you want to see.’ ‘Knowing you, of course you’d think that.’ It was right there! Sometimes, he wasn’t sure what he had to do to offend someone anymore, with them all getting along so well.
Which was for the best, really. He had thought long and hard about what needed to be done to prevent anyone from going through the battles Flik had gone through in his youth. He had lighted on the conclusion that they needed a world in which those things just didn’t happen, which started with making sure that hateful men didn’t run their own government. If anyone had reacted poorly, everyone would have seen it, and Viktor would have done quite mercenary things indeed to make sure they went nowhere in the world they were building.
Valeria sucked in a silent breath while shuffling her new hand, which Viktor only knew about because his arm was on her back. For a moment, he thought he was in luck. But instead, her face composed and her eyes on the cards, she said, “I’d like you to come by tonight, Viktor.”
He raised his eyebrows. After a second, one of the men gave a short, sharp whistle. “Well—”
“I have something I need to tell you,” she continued, unfazed. “But I would prefer it be in private.”
“Is that so?”
“I think she’s going to propose to you,” joked Kwanda, nearly even-faced.
“Oh, I know she knows better than that,” replied Viktor. Kwanda’s man and Grenseal both laughed, short and sharp.
“I think she’s going to kill you,” Alen countered.
“Hm.” Viktor looked at Valeria, who was expressionless, but with a certain shine in her eyes. “Well, are you?”
“I said we’d discuss it in private.”
“You’d tell me if you were about to kill me, right, crazy?”
“Of course, baby,” she said, mockingly. “Who would I be if I didn’t give you a chance to defend yourself?”
“Not the fun-loving girl I know. Tonight, then.”
“You’d better be there,” she told him.
“She’ll let you get a couple hits in before taking your head off,” laughed Grenseal, and put down an opening card that wasn’t a bad move but could have been better. “You won’t win, though.”
“No more than any of us are going to beat her at this damn game,” complained Kwanda, throwing down his cards to forfeit. A real smile bloomed across Valeria’s face at the sight of the cards slowly sliding away from each other on the table. “I haven’t met the man who can beat her yet, and at this point, I can’t imagine the man that could.”
—
A few quick, softs laughs wrinkled the skin around Flik’s eyes. With a gauntleted hand, he covered his mouth, then made a movement to wipe them away. Still, when he revealed his face again, Viktor saw his nearly smothered smile.
Unlike Viktor, Flik now preferred to have four solid walls around him, windowless, and for the door to be barred. He needed to have a solid wall at his back and keys in his hand. Viktor hated the feeling—like being locked in a cell—but if Flik needed it, he’d have it.
He had a sheet over the window, letting in only a little light through its blue threads. The room, on the highest floor of the castle, was not very far from Tir’s. Wind sang in from outside, past the grate Flik had had installed. The furnishings were nearly bare of decoration, since Flik had not got in the habit of keeping many possessions, but the walls were hung with the sort of tapestry they had seen all around his home village.
They sat on either side of a small table, a bit of rescued driftwood whose surface had been flattened and lacquered, on chairs from a carpenter in Kaku. On the table there was a jar of wine and two cups. Viktor had drunk two, but Flik was still hardly nursing his first.
Flik had stopped drinking after Soniere. He had been drinking every day before. That short time of forced sobriety, it seemed, had made a permanent change.
Flik was always doing things that stunned Viktor. He had seen plenty of men make such dramatic changes to their lives, but they were temporary. Resolve crumbled in weeks. But Flik was always taking lessons hard after learning them just once, making alterations that went all the way to his core. He improved himself, unflinching, in ways that many men could not even imagine doing. He simply did it; he clutched what was handed to him, good or ill, moved forward, and he got better all the time.
The wine-cup sweated. Flik dropped his gaze to the table, where they played a simple table-game, moving counters and stones. “Come off it,” he said. “You’re getting cold feet because we’re so close to finishing this.”
“We might be!” Viktor insisted. “I don’t have cold feet, I’m just making sure we haven’t made any dumb mistakes. If we play our hand right we could be two rounds from the end.”
“Shasarazade, then Gregminster.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s like saying you’re two mountains away from your destination. They’re still mountains.”
“Yes, but mountains we can climb.”
“You’re so certain.”
“I know what we’ve built, Flik,” he said, moving a counter across the board. He wasn’t trying to win the game on the table in front of him. He wanted Flik to win eventually, so he was only stalling for now. “We have a movement that can sweep the old world away and bring in the new one. We have the numbers. We have the willpower. The Empire is faltering. They’re losing the will to fight, excepting only General Shulen. If we take her the rest will wash away. Gregminster is a joke, other than the sorceress. They don’t want to fight. We could have a new world in under a week.”
“A new world,” said Flik, and, without looking at the board, made a very good move. Perhaps better than he realized. Viktor would have to think about how to get out of that. “The world Odessa dreamed about.”
Viktor lifted his cup and took a slow drink.
Flik asked him, in a curious, quiet tone, “When did this stop being Odessa’s movement to you, Viktor?”
Viktor paused, and then let out his air in a slow sigh. “Oh, I don’t know. A while ago. After General Teo, I think.”
“After Soniere.”
“No. I think Tir really became the leader of this army after that. Everyone follows him now, even in their hearts. And they will until the end. That’s one of our main strengths. Most people don’t want to follow the Emperor or his goons any more. They want the new boss, and they want him to look like Tir. But I hadn’t realized I wasn’t really in Odessa’s army anymore until… I think when I was waiting for Tir in Moravia. I knew he would come get me. I knew it was his army when I saw him with them.”
“I knew right away,” Flik said, softly. “I saw how everyone gathered around him the second I came to this castle and I hated it. It hasn’t been Odessa’s army, or her movement, for a long time. How strange it is that it’s still following her dream.”
“She chose the right man.”
“I don’t know how. I really suspected him of doing it for his own sake at first. I wanted that to be true. I wanted all of this to be a prodigal noble son’s powergrab. Then I could have exiled him and had Odessa’s army back. But he’s for real. He wants a better world, and not for himself.”
“Flik, I’ll be stunned if he’s running anything larger than a kitchen once this war is over,” Viktor said honestly. He finished his cup and poured another. “I’ll tell you what he wants: to do the right thing. That’s all. He’ll have a quiet life once this is over, mark my words. He’s not cut out for running a country and I mean that as a compliment.”
“Odessa wasn’t, either,” Flik continued. “I once asked her what she would do once she freed Toran, and she told me she might get married.”
Viktor closed his eyes for a second.
“I don’t believe that, honestly,” Flik said. “I think she would have found the next place to liberate, and I would have been with her.”
“Ha.” Viktor shook his head, but could not quite disperse the feeling. “Me, too, if I had a choice.”
“If we had a choice. I know. Do you think we’re just reaching back for those happy days, when we were only the spring-green beginnings of a movement, no one was dead and no bloody wars fought in our name? Would we really have made the same choices with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t see her dream anymore, Viktor,” Flik said, looking down at the board, unmoving. “When I told you that, I meant that I think it’s gotten away from me. I didn’t mean that I thought we weren’t doing what she wanted. It’s that we were a handful of hopeless, happy men on a mission that we believed in, nearly doomed every day. The world was against us. We worked our nails down scrabbling to accomplish what she wanted, and now, it’s almost done. And… I don’t want the victory. I want the work. I want to keep fighting. I don’t want the world to be at peace. I don’t know if I can handle it. I’m terrified now that I don’t actually want her dream. Maybe she did really want a peaceful life, a better world, to live in, to be married and have children. I’m the one who wants to keep fighting.”
“Flik, you want a better world for others,” Viktor insisted. “That’s noble.”
“But I don’t know how much I really want it myself,” he said, “I think about it, and I think…” He looked up at the light that came through the shaded window, meager, full of drifting dust. “I think that I just want to keep going. I want to stay here, where the fight is on. I don’t ever want to stop. Really, I want to go back. I just want to go back to what we had, in the cellars of Lenankamp…”
Flik put one hand over his face. The other stayed on the table, frozen.
It hadn’t been long at all, Viktor reminded himself. It had now barely been months since Flik found out that Odessa had died and no one had told him. He wasn’t over the loss. It would be unreasonable for him to be over it. Viktor wasn’t over it, and he had had much more time.
Deep inside, it was all he wanted too. He loved Tir dearly, and he did want to see the work through, to successfully establish Odessa’s dream in reality. But there was nothing that he truly wanted beyond that. Maybe, just like Flik, all he wanted was for the fight to never end.
But it would. The rebellion became the government. The dream became a country, a map, committees and construction projects. Rebel leaders became generals and councilors. If Viktor could even fit into that picture, he didn’t think he would like it.
“We must celebrate the fact that her dream will be real,” Viktor eventually said, “despite being unfit for it.”
Flik’s hand tightened on his eyes, for a moment. Viktor watched, uncertain if he should go forward or backward. Did Flik want comforted, now, or would a touch only make him force his pain down? The man across the table was his lover, and long before that, his friend. Yet even now, Viktor didn’t know the right thing to do to—
Make Flik chose him.
That was what Viktor wanted, and he hadn’t even known until just now.
It was an ugly thing to want. He almost wished that he hadn’t realized, but he would have to swallow it now. He hoped that if Odessa had lived, he would never have realized. But they were in the world with her dream but without her smile, where swords accomplished her aims and the house in which she and Flik would have been husband and wife was burned to the ground before they even got there.
“They’ll build a beautiful world,” Flik said, his voice tight. “And I can’t be there, because I cannot put down the sword.”
Shining Odessa sat on his bed right now, encased, asleep. If Odessa were to live on in something, Viktor thought, the last thing she would have chosen was a sword. But these were the people she had left behind—and she had chosen someone else to carry on her dream for a reason.
“I, too,” said Viktor, “want Odessa’s dream for someone other than myself.”
Flik laughed. In that laugh, it was clear that he had not been able to hold back the tears.
“I think, if we made a perfect world,” Viktor said, leaning onto the table, “there would be nowhere at all I could go. So it’s good for me that we won’t possibly be able to do that. I think I’m fit for taking out the worst of the worst, but after that, it’s best that I move on.”
“Oh, fuck you, Viktor,” said Flik, his aggravation slightly stronger than his misery. “You’re one of the kindest people I know.”
“Come on.”
“I have never seen anyone so routinely put others before himself, selflessly serve them, and never ask for a thing in return. You are the worst mercenary I have ever met. Even you know this, you just don’t believe… that everything that happened to you would have happened to a good person. Bad things happen to good people, Viktor, and that’s all I can tell you.”
Viktor couldn’t help slumping forward. After a moment, he picked up his cup and drank. He took a deep breath and then said, “I don’t know how you know that, brother, but you cannot tell anyone.”
Flik took his hand from his eyes. They were red-rimmed and there was a tear on his cheek, but despite everything, and with a bravery that flashed like lightning, Flik was willing to let Viktor see it anyway. “You are my brother,” he said, with a nearly caustic affection in his voice. “I know you. I haven’t paid attention to a single thing you said about yourself in years. I watched what you did. You can lie to the whole world if you want, but don’t lie to me.”
Viktor heaved a breath like he had been hit in the gut. “Okay.”
“You love this awful world, you love this creaking castle, you love Tir, you love his army, you want to see them succeed so badly. And once they have—and you’re right, they will—I want you to do what you want, for once. What you actually want, not what you think you deserve.”
“Where do you get off being that mature?” Viktor asked, wounded. “When did that happen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I am. Because I nearly died too many times, maybe. Viktor, I’m serious. I don’t care what you have to do, or where you have to go. After this, I just want you to be happy. As happy as you can be. I can’t bring your home back. I wish I could. If you want to sail away into the night, if you want to rule the underground, I don’t care as long as you’re doing what genuinely makes you happy.”
“I could say the same for you.”
“Oh, I don’t know what the fuck makes me happy,” Flik said with an explosive sigh. “I told you, I can’t—I don’t know what the way forward is. All I want is to go back. I’ve started thinking I’ll do the same thing, for now, while I figure it out.”
“Mercenary work?”
“It’ll keep me sharp.”
“That’s not really the way to find yourself.”
“I can’t even imagine anything else.”
“Will you go all by yourself?”
“I wouldn’t take anyone with me.”
“You’re trying to die.”
“I’m not.”
“Flik,” Viktor said, and heard the dangerous drop in his own tone. He didn’t like to get that intense. “You don’t lie to me either. You’ve been glancing behind your shoulder at death for months. You chose the sword; don’t think I hear the double-meaning in those words. Giving up is the one thing I won’t let you do.”
“God,” Flik sighed, and covered his face again.
He was quiet for a minute. Finally, he responded, “I would ask you something, but it wouldn’t be right.”
“What wouldn’t be right?”
“By God, I’ll miss you.”
“Flik.”
“With everything I just said, it wouldn’t be right.” He revealed his eyes, again, which were looking away at the wall. “I’d be a hypocrite.”
“Just ask me.”
“You’ll do it.”
“Of course I will.”
“That’s why I can’t ask. I need you to live for yourself. I need you to stop being everyone’s servant and live.”
“Who says I’m not doing what I enjoy already?”
“Hell, you might be.”
“Flik, I told you I’d be honest with you, and I will be,” he said. He hated how his heart had picked up, but it heard something, with its own ear, and was straining to listen. “Ask. If I don’t want to, I’ll tell you, no fuss, no hesitation.”
Flik dropped his hands. One went to the table, and the other sank down to his side. He looked utterly exhausted, like he had just dropped a heavy pack that he had carried for miles.
Eyes shut, he asked, “Will you stay with me?”
Viktor watched his face, the mere twitches of his cheek at his eyelid, as he waited for a response. He thought that he couldn’t possibly deserve this. Then he thought that, after all, he was a soldier of fortune.
Viktor was in it for himself. At least, if Flik insisted he was.
He reached forward, toward Flik’s face. As the fingers of his hands opened, he recalled, with a stinging in his heart, Valeria’s demand that he come to her tonight. If he dropped that, if he didn’t come, it was certainly over with her. Their relationship had been strained by him growing closer to Flik for too long, she wouldn’t tolerate being treated coldly any longer. She wouldn't actually throw him off a tower or fight him to death in the street, but if he didn’t show up tonight, she would simply take the hint and freeze him out.
If he said yes to Flik now, though, he couldn’t possibly turn around and leave him for someone else tonight. Viktor had to pick one.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be worth it. But Viktor uncurled the fingers of his hand, and he dropped it. He leaned over the table, upsetting the game-counters, ending the game. He brushed his hand along Flik’s cheek, collecting the tear as he went.
“I’m in.”
—
Original Note:
In Chinese classic novels (like the Water Margin upon which Suikoden is tenuously founded) the characters are usually drinking some variety of rice-based alcohol (both 'they are usually drinking' and 'the drink is usually rice wine.'). Translators differ on how they name the various types of rice alcohol but I honestly like the translations where they just call it 'wine' instead of trying to make it exotic. Hence, Valeria is drinking 'liquor' instead of baijiu and Viktor and Flik are drinking 'wine' instead of mijiu. Putting ice in it doesn't feel very 'ancient China' but we aren't actually in ancient China, despite the aesthetics. There are elves and kobolds. I think if we can have elevators and death lasers we can have ice technology.
The war, which had been slow before, went very fast after the death of Teo McDohl. By the time Valeria was accepting the title of Great General of the Toran Republic, she was barely in her second trimester.
Just as she had predicted, Viktor and Flik had stolen away with each other the minute they could, a matched set of thieves. Neither had said goodbye, unless she assumed a certain gift of a necklace left under her bedroom pillow was from a lover left in the night.
The only person she had even told she was carrying a child was Sylvina, because she had become pregnant at the same time. She had sworn to not tell anyone but Kirkis (of course), so the second and third person Valeria told about her pregnancy, standing straight and heels together, were President LePant and his wife (as he got nothing at all done without her).
“Oh, my,” said Eileen, a hand on her mouth.
“Congratulations,” said LePant, though he looked stunned.
“Presuming I don’t lose it, of course,” Valeria continued. “I haven’t had one before, so I’m not sure what my odds are.”
“You’re a strong woman, and you have good hips,” Eileen said, sounding like she meant nothing at all by it. “You should be fine.”
Valeria was more worried about being hit, or stabbed, or burned alive, or any number of things that could happen to a public face of a new republic, but she decided to let that compliment be as it was. “I know I’m not fit for motherhood, so I’m already planning to give it away. I only let you know because I will have to be temporarily relieved of duty for the birth and recovery.”
“Don’t feel you have to do that,” said LePant. “If you want to keep it, you can keep it. It won’t be a problem with your duties. You know we’re setting you up with a household, whether you like it or not. You can have a nurse, a nanny—”
“I’ve already selected foster parents. To be blunt, President, I don’t want it.”
After a pause, he replied, “Not everyone is suited to be a parent. If you say so, then I believe you. Will it be going to the father, then?...”
“Unfortunately,” she replied, unflinching, “I have no idea who that is.”
LePant looked nervous. Eileen put a hand on her mouth to hide a giggle. “I told you that some of the fighting ladies were having a marvelous time in the barracks,” she said to her husband.
“Well, then, Valeria, it’s your business,” LePant decided. “I trust you know what will be best, and please lean on us if there are any complications. Though I’d hate to never meet your only child. I wonder if you could tell us who the foster mother is?...”
Valeria knew he was asking not because he was nosy, but because the man was an incurable father figure. “Oh,” she said, “Did I not say? It’s Sylvina.”
—
Sylvina and Kirkis had agreed to the idea immediately. It felt right, in a way none of them were able to put into words, to raise the two prison-begot children together. When Valeria saw them together in Sylvina’s arms, as she smiled and giggled and bounced them, it looked right, too. Sylvina’s was much smaller, paler, softer; her own, though, happily settled into his new little sister, like they had been together from the start.
“The damnedest thing,” she sighed, straightening up to stand, feeling every stressed joint and muscle with consternation, “is that I still can’t tell whose it is.”
Sylvina laughed out loud. “The eyes will give it away eventually,” she said, in her cute little lisp, “or the nose, or the chin, or some other thing. Flik and Viktor do not look particularly alike.”
“They don’t.”
“It has to be one of them, then?” asked Kirkis. He was leaned back in a wicker chair, understandably exhausted, because he had just handed both of the little bastards off to Sylvina after a long while of minding them himself while his wife hosted guests. They had all left except for Valeria, now, which was why they were speaking so freely.
Valeria took no offense to the question. Kirkis didn’t mean it as a judgement, and she hadn’t been bothered with things like body counts in years. “Has to be. I wasn’t doing stupid things like that before we went underground, and the dates match up.”
“Don’t they,” he replied. Valeria and Sylvina had delivered within two days of each other. The pregnancies themselves were so similar that Valeria hadn’t even worried about the child being able to drink elven milk or anything silly like that. As it turned out, there had been no issues with it at all. It was likely the young man would essentially be an oddly large elf once he was grown. “That’s a bit of a shame, then.”
“Oh?”
Kirkis sighed and pulled the hair he now kept long into a tail. “I know either of them would have been happy to have him. But then, they were the ones who ran off before they could hear about him.”
Valeria pulled in a breath, but then chose to let it out in a sigh.
She did know both of them well enough to say he was right. They would have panicked, and maybe been uncertain, but she knew that in the end, either of them would have taken him in.
She looked down and said, “You should be with your father, poor thing. They both would have loved you, whichever one made you. I’m sure that wherever they are, they’re together, and they’re staying that way.”
Sylvina reached up to her, but Valeria brusquely denied the sympathy. She cut the meeting short, promising she would return soon to make sure all was well; in the meanwhile, she had a Republic to defend.
She knew the whole truth. She could have told the two of them that she was having their child while they were still there. She had known nearly the day she was pregnant.
But she was a little mad at them, and remained so. And they might have tried to stay with her if they knew about the child, or might have even broken it off with each other, and she wasn’t having that.
Those two were staying together, wherever they were.