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is there -
is there anyone here - at all - except for me?
The psionic attack is…underwhelming. Whatever they were expecting, this fell short.
“Honestly,” Elliott stretches on the couch; his legs twitch as if he is unsure whether to put his feet up on the coffee table, “call me an old grump but I think her kit needs more workshopping before they toss another half-baked Legend into the arena.”
“You are only peeved because the illusions looked too close to your decoys,” Boone points out. His free arm - the one not thrown around Elliott’s shoulders - tenses and relaxes minutely, fingers splaying over the worn fabric of the couch and dancing along the patterns of the blanket thrown over their laps.
It is a nervous tick, one of many that plague him post-respawn, but not of the alarming variety. Those have mercifully faded hours prior.
“So what if I am?” Elliott raises his eyebrows. “Listen, you know how many times the orgs shot me down before I caved and gave them the decoys? I went through all this spooky stuff too, and they didn’t like it! But now they apper-apparently do. So what if I’m salty? Sue me.”
Bloodhound, curled up on Elliott’s other side, says nothing. Their gaze is turned inwards - it is uncertain whether they follow the conversation.
The three of them were on the same squad and got hit simultaneously. For a moment, it felt as if the sun had gone out, plunging the world into a purple sort of darkness, like a negative of an old photo, before light filled it out again. It was disorienting, grasping at something ancient at the core of their brains, ringing alarms. Wicked shadows danced in their periphery, aligning for moments into shapes of people, distorted familiar faces, before dissolving and reforming into something new.
Then it faded. They shook it off. Executed a counterattack that was almost flawless, a bullet from Elliott’s pistol cutting down the newcomer, her tattooed arms and dyed hair splayed where she hit the ground.
A different squad wiped them out hours later. By then, her attack was already gone from their minds, replaced by more immediate threats. Fresh additions to the roster often underperform, crushed by the pressure and the urgent need to adapt and find their niche in the intricate biome - and so, nobody gave it another thought.
The shadows, however, linger - in Boone’s tick that will not leave him, in Elliott’s undammed chatter, in Bloodhound’s contemplative silence.
It is nothing, probably. All of them had been hit with much, much worse, on either side of the ring, and all of it had been survived - and after a while, you stop counting the scars.
It is nothing, they decide, unspoken, when they retire for the night.
It is nothing.
***
Bloodhound stalks through the winter forest, hjarn giving beneath their feet with soft creaking noises. A faint yet undeniably present sense of urgency is chasing them, pressing them forward against the scalding whips of tree branches. One of the moons hangs low in the night sky, leaning in to inspect the cover of snow, two cold faces staring at each other.
Bloodhound stumbles over a body, black against the deep blue hue of the snow. Unlike the moon, they do not pause to look for the face. Soon enough, they almost trip over another, furs and feathers clumped together with rust, limbs bent and frozen at unnatural angles.
That one is lying supine. Bloodhound catches a glimpse of a torn throat - no, it is not a throat but a beard, ginger and braided, and– no, they will not look. Their fingers are stuck in the innards of a broken Charge rifle.
They cough, desperate, and break into a run, weaving and leaping to avoid stepping on heads, hands, concave stomachs - failing, sometimes.
There are two bodies at a clearing. Bloodhound recognizes their shapes even before they melt upwards into standing figures, even before their frozen throats rumble to life.
“Bloth,” Boone wheezes their name, and for a moment he is not in the snow, for a moment it is sand, instead, blanketing his chest, sticking to him with his own steaming, cooling blood. “Bloth.”
“Illias,” Bloodhound breathes, stopping before him - standing before him, and for a moment he is down in the sand and they are on their knees and try, pointlessly, to drag his convulsing form into their lap, and then he is towering over them again. Dark pits of his eyes bore into theirs.
“Hound,” Elliott chokes out next to Boone, a black mass trickling over his chest. His whisper is hoarse, too much matter thickening his throat to let air pass through. “Why did you bring me there.”
Startled, Bloodhound takes a step back. They remember - they do not - they - there was a trip to New Dawn, a trip that went so awfully wrong - or did it? Did it ever happen?
It drips from him, black and viscous, diving under the shelter of snow. Lives there, under, searching for a new body to inhabit. Bloodhound shifts their weight. Their skin crawls in an urge to flee.
“Elliott - I am sorry,” they say. “I did not mean–” they look at Boone too, black on black, steaming blood turning dry and dead. “I never meant for it to happen. To either of you, I swear–”
“You’ll kill us,” Elliott interrupts, so fatally serious. “You know that, right? Didn’t quite work out those times,” he throws Boone a sidelong glance as he drags his fingers through óséður’ s gore left of his chest, “but there’s plenty of opportunity still.”
“I w– I won’t,” Bloodhound argues, but their voice catches, breaking the spine of the promise into a plea. “I won’t - I will never do that to you.”
Elliott scoffs. “Right. As if we’re different somehow.”
Grief constricts Bloodhound’s chest, the same grief that first wound its coils around their heart on the day New Dawn fell, the grief that keeps tightening its hold every time the body count rises, gravestones and pyres and nameless, clueless splotches of blood in the sand bending their back to the ground. For a moment, they cannot speak, their throat spasming with a bitter ache as the cold reaches from their chest upwards.
Boone toes at something at his feet, covered in snow - dusted in sand, particles crawling into the wounds, every nerve exposed but every scream useless. Bloodhound does not look down.
“I love you,” Bloodhound tries to tell them. Looks between them, trying to catch at least a glimpse of - something. “I love you, Elliott. Illias, I love you.”
“Do you, though?” Elliott asks and shivers away in disgust when they reach for him. “Or am I just convenient?”
“Did you?” Boone asks; blood spills over his humourless smirk. “Or was I simply the solution to your leaderless people?”
“I did - I do,” they say, their whole body shivering as they hold themself back, away from Elliott’s grimacing face, away from his unspoken warning. Their face is wet, the cold stinging their cheeks. “I do, I love you. I love you.”
Boone lies still in the sand, his blood trickling and slowing and stopping. Elliott’s eyes are dead and inhuman, and Bloodhound’s shoulder echoes with ghostly pain as another body is added to the pyre, and there is nothing, nothing, nothing they can do but watch and wait and prepare themself.
***
“Anything?” Bloth asks, quietly enough that their voice has to be picked up by the comms for Boone to hear.
The three of them hide around the bend of an outcropping, the razor-sharp curve of the ring humming at their backs. They cannot move in yet, the area before them too open.
Boone leads the point of his scoped Sentinel over the horizon, grazing the jagged lines of Talos’s staked out corpse. The air is hot and dry.
With an almost audible ping, his nape tingles with a hasty warning - one of his pulse blades is picking up activity. He swings the Sentinel to point in its direction, but it’s all clear still. The enemy, whoever they are, is far away for now. Nobody needs to worry.
“Not yet,” he replies.
Bloodhound hums, frustrated. “It is too quiet. I do not trust this.”
Their words grate at Boone - would it hurt them to have a little more faith? He grinds his teeth. “No one. Is. There,” he measures out carefully, not wanting to snap.
He’s antsy, there’s no denying it. They nearly got their guts smoked out by Caustic just an hour before, and the threat of the respawn chamber looms ever closer. Still, Boone bites it back as much as he can. He isn’t gonna take it out on Bloth and Elliott.
Bloth cries out a moment before the crack of a faraway sniper splits the air in two.
“Shit!” Elliott drops to the ground, looking around wildly even as he is trying to help Bloth stem the bleeding from their pierced thigh. “Where–”
“This way!” Boone doesn’t bother trying to snipe back, his world narrowing to Bloth’s miserable form, guilt burning acidic and heady. “Around the wall - they won’t see us from here.”
“They– what– you knew!” Elliott exclaims, incredulous, as the two of them get Bloth behind cover. “Why didn’t you say anything?!”
“Because it was safe!”
“Well it very obviously wasn’t!” Elliott isn’t even looking at him now, busy hooking Bloth up with their last medkit.
The ring roars next to them, crimson and ominous. Charged almost to the full - they are in the penultimate round. Boone can barely hear a fucking thing over it. It crawls into his head, stoking the ache in it, and why can’t everyone just be quiet for a moment–
Elliott pushes him, both hands square in the chest. “You almost got Bloth killed!”
It was a fucking mistake, Boone knows that, but the more Elliott talks the less he is willing to admit it. They wouldn’t even be on this bloody edge of the map if Elliott didn’t want to replicate, and Boone warned them that it was a bad idea, but nooo, why listen to Boone? He’s working his fucking best with what he’s got.
Bloth hisses a wordless protest at Elliott, already hauling themself up to intervene, but Boone barely spares them a glance as his vision is engulfed in red, something vicious and angry gripping him, and so he pushes back.
Elliott stumbles back - trips - and falls into the storm.
“Elliott!!” Bloth lunges for him and drags him out faster than Boone can react, faster than he can realize what he’d done.
Elliott shudders where he collapses helplessly to the ground, back in the safety of the ring. His mouth is open but he doesn’t scream, his body locked up in a pained seizure.
Boone just stares. He did this - he did this to him. He got Bloth hurt - and now he…
Only because he didn’t watch his brute strength. Only because he forgot himself for a second.
“Heimskr - Ella - this is our last syringe, I am so sorry,” Bloth talks to him as they make the injection. It barely makes a difference - the storm is a shredder at this point. The skin of Elliott’s face is blotchy with burst vessels, tears from his squeezed shut eyes are etching tracks over the burns.
“What were you thinking,” Bloth snaps, and Boone hunches his shoulders.
The fight is gone faster than it appeared. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t think–”
“Of course you didn’t, you never do,” Bloth interrupts him. Their hands are so gentle on Elliott’s mangled form. “You simply do your thing, and we are the ones that pay. You truly think so little of us.”
But that’s not true– “That’s not true!” Boone protests. “I love you– I didn’t…”
“Save your words,” Bloth interrupts him again; they have now said more than they did over the whole match. “Enough is enough. I am out of chances to give.”
Boone stands frozen over them. His hand twitches to reach out, but Elliott cringes away, noticing it despite the agony he must be feeling.
He is afraid. Of Boone.
His heart collapses in on itself.
“Besides,” Bloth adds; their voice is an ice shard. “I know I was only a notch on your bedpost. Foolish of me to have trusted you. With anything.”
***
“G’mornin’.” Elliott walks into the kitchen, yawning and scratching his stomach before pulling the hem of his tank top back down. His bare feet tingle with cold as he makes his way across the tiled floor to the sweet promise of coffee, and it’s only when he’s pouring himself a mug that he realizes he hasn’t been greeted back.
“‘Sup?” he asks, turning around and leaning back against the counter.
Hound and Boone are by the kitchen island; Hound is perched on a stool with their back to Elliott while Boone is resting his elbows on the tabletop, his form still hulking even as he stands somewhat hunched. They’re talking in low voices, the pebble-clean syllables of their dialects clacking easily together.
They’re only a few steps away. There’s no way they haven’t noticed or heard him.
“Guys?” Elliott asks again, raising his voice. He wills away the bitter spill of anxiety in the pit of his stomach: switching from Common is usually not a good sign.
They don’t seem to be fighting though. If anything, they look…exhausted. Boone’s face is lined with stress, and Hound’s shoulders are bowed even as they visibly strain to keep their back straight.
“Lia? Houndie?” Elliott feels ridiculous for feeling so anxious all of a sudden - what the fuck, seriously, he should be chill with getting ignored every now and then - but the tension in his stomach won’t go away and the back of his throat is starting to burn with acid.
Boone’s eyes flit over him. “He’s awake,” he says, his Common weighed down with an Eddan lilt so soon after speaking it.
“Ah. So he is.” Hound pushes themself off the stool and turns around to face him. “We were talking about you.”
Oh shit– they were– But Elliott doesn’t get the chance to freak out over it because that’s when his eyes land on Hound’s face.
It’s gone. It’s - fog, and shifting features, and a hint of something almost recognizable before it slips away. Elliott frowns and rubs at his eyes, but Hound remains - faceless.
Why can’t he see their face? Has he - forgotten what it looks like?
Oh no. Is this - is this how it begins, is…
“I…” Elliott says just to say something and clears his throat. His hands are empty - when did he put the mug down? What were they talking about… “You were…”
Hound sighs. “It is happening again,” they tell Boone.
“I told you.” Boone raises an eyebrow. “Something’s gotta give. We can’t leave it as it is if he’s just going to keep getting worse.”
What are they– what do they mean?
“Guys?” Elliott repeats, willing his voice not to shake. “What’s going on?”
“You’re confused,” Boone tells him; his face is a poorly drawn mask of sympathy. “But it’s okay. We’ve got a solution.”
Elliott opens his mouth to ask - what the fuck, what kind of solution - but then Boone shifts ever so slightly closer to Hound, and his expression hardens.
Ah. Well. Elliott did wonder - did wonder, sometimes, whether Boone tolerated him in all this for Hound’s sake alone, and this looks like…
No, no, it can’t be real. This can’t be real, Boone loves him too, this has to be some sort of mistake…
Elliott stares at his hands. Turns them over, runs the pad of his thumbs over other fingers. And then it clicks.
“I’m asleep,” he mutters. Then, louder, “I’m asleep! It’s not real, I’m asleep!”
The relief that washes over him is so potent that Elliott almost feels like drowning but instead he laughs, giddy with it. A dream! An awful dream, but simply a dream.
It’s all okay. It’s all–
Hound - faceless - releases a deep sigh. They look so tired, even like this. “Here it is again,” they murmur to Boone. Then, to Elliott, “You - forgot that you had awoken.”
“We keep trying to tell you,” Boone echoes.
“No, no,” Elliott shakes his head; tries to back away, but the counter digs into the small of his back. “No, it’s not real! It’s a dream! You wouldn’t– why– I love you…”
Boone grimaces. “Do you even believe it yourself? Do you know who we are?”
Of course he knows, they are– they are…
They stare back at him, one faceless, the other sharp and grim. Elliott’s eyes dart over them, panicked and helpless, but there is nothing to grasp onto. Nothing sparks recognition.
They are strangers. Strangers.
“Have you…?” one of them gestures at something in the other’s hand. It’s a phone.
Elliott’s heart grows cold.
“Yeah. They’re on the way.”
***
It is unclear who awakens first. Perhaps all three do it at the same time.
It is unclear who is the first to cry. Maybe tears have already followed them from their dream worlds into the shared waking one. They reach for one another, aching to reassure and to be reassured, hands interrupting each other’s trajectories, bodies pressing haphazardly together, sticky as they are with cooling, terrified sweat.
It is unclear at which point the teary need for closeness turns into something more desperate, but turn it does - because they are desperate. Desperate when gliding hands turn to grasping, desperate when choked off sobs crack into gasps and melt into moans, desperate when they find each other’s faces in the dark and let their lips trace the salt on their cheeks.
They trade kisses, their skin warm and tender from so much contact. There is a hint of blood on their tongues - someone must have bitten their lip while they slept.
“Let me– I want you guys to–” Elliott breaks away from Bloodhound and rolls onto his back, his legs falling easily open. “Lia, come here.”
Boone hesitates, afraid to move too closely even as he is shaking with the need for it.
“Are you - are you sure–” he asks, hands ghosting over his skin, a sharp intake of breath interrupting him when Elliott pushes into the touch.
“Yes, aps-absolutely, now, please,” Elliott says as he attempts to corral Boone in between his thighs, as he almost drags Bloodhound to straddle his chest at the same time, their back to Boone. “Both of you - I need it.”
Boone does not ask again, and Bloodhound does not even attempt to. Clinging and hurried, they barely remember to bother with lubrication - but they do, however, and soon Boone is pulling Elliott’s hips into his lap and sinking into him with gritted teeth, and Elliott strangles his moan in Bloodhound, diving into them as they shiver above him, their grip white-knuckled on the headboard.
They need it, they all do - the simple reassurance that they are alive, the slightly more complicated one that they are wanted. They gift each other their touches in the drifting darkness of the night, navigating themselves to the shore, panicked as any shipwreck survivors would be but surviving nonetheless.
Elliott coaxes Bloodhound’s hips into a rolling movement, encourages them to ride the same wave Boone has caught behind them, and then reaches up to trace their features - shadowed in the dark, but coming into reality under his seeking touch.
“I’m awake, right?” he asks. His eyes are shiny. “I’m awake - it’s not a–”
“You are,” Bloodhound breathes, their fear mirroring his so perfectly. “We all are, I swear– ha-ahh, Elliott…”
Boone leans forward to hide his face between the sharp blades of Bloodhound’s shoulders, pants humid and hot into their bared skin. They indulge him for a moment before they twist around as much as they can and then twist their arm too so that they can touch his chest, fingers catching on the raised lines of his scars, skin tender and thin - but unbroken. Healed, as much as it can ever heal, the unpunctured border of Boone’s body keeping him whole.
They come - not together, but close enough that one moan melts into the next, one trembling body sending shivers into the other two, the lines of their breaths blurring.
They melt down gradually, leaves meandering their way through the air before coming to rest on the ground, and lie tangled together, heads nestling on shoulders and arms following the valleys of waists. They murmur - “I love you.” - “I love you.” - “I love you, please–” - over and over, none of them willing to leave any of the calls unanswered, arms tightening convulsively around each other at every confirmation.
“So, uh,” Elliott says eventually. “That was awful. Not the– but– you know.”
Boone grumbles something wordless in response, holding tighter onto him. On Boone's other side, Bloodhound nods into his nape, too drained to speak.
They will need to bring it up - surely it cannot be an intended effect. Going through something like this every time - or, even, ever again…is entirely too much. One time was entirely too much.
But for now, the fringes of their minds still haunted by the nightmares, they only try to make it through to the morning.