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duplicity inbox / cw for nsfw shenanigans.

TEXT / VOICE / VIDEO / ACTION
NOTE: felix generally responds to everything in text, even voice or video calls. expect 90% of his replies to be text-based regardless of urgency.

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[ Probably. He's been called that before. Ephemera doesn't try to stop Felix, just watches him go. Wonders, not for the first time, exactly what the fuck he's doing.

He tips his head back. The air's cool right now. Almost calming. ]

Come spar with me.

[ It's said abruptly. ]

( spar with him? felix hears it, and he nearly keeps walking. should just go home. stop engaging him. ephemera clearly has no fucking idea what he's doing when he keeps circling back around to felix. painfully naive despite the life he's lived.

halfway across the lot, felix stops. he doesn't turn around. he digs his cigarettes from his pocket and lights another one, realizes he's shaking as he brings it to his mouth. hairline tremor, from the tips of his fingers down to his wrist. he exhales a puff of smoke around his cigarette and flexes his fingers. two names stare back up at him, cemented on his skin.

finally, after a long silence: )

Here? Like this?

( he doesn't have his rig. wouldn't be much of a spar. )

[ There's a pause. But Felix doesn't laugh him off or throw a knife into his goddamn face, so. That's something. Possibly a mistake, but there it stands.

Ephemera watches him for a moment. ]

Not right now.

[ Maybe when they're both armored up. Or unarmored. Whichever. ]

But sure. Here. Why the fuck not.

Plenty of reasons to why the fuck not, actually.

( he pivots to face him, half-obscured behind tendrils of smoke. easier to study him with some measure of distance between them, when felix isn't at risk of crossing lines like touching his lips with his tongue and blowing smoke into his goddamn mouth. he looks at the cut of ephemera in his rig, the tangle of his dark hair. he'd called him pretty in the arena. heat of the moment, thinking with his dick. you're pretty like this, on top of me, under me. pretty like this, scars and all.

he taps ash from his cigarette, almost thoughtful. )

All right. Next time.

[ It occurs to Ephemera, watching Felix and the rising curl of smoke, that this is the first time they've had a conversation that didn't somehow end bloody. It felt inevitable, just what people like them do at the end of the day. It was almost simple, except for that tiny part at the end where they didn't kill each other.

Could have. There were openings, clear as day. And yet, they held back every time.

Ephemera breathes out slow. He's calm. It won't last, it never does. But right now, he's steady as stone. ]

All right.

[ Exhale, soldier. ]

( it's an odd standstill. time goes funny more often than not around ephemera, but felix takes a moment to center himself in the strangeness. doesn't really work. he inhales on his cigarette, and gritty smoke unfurls into his lungs, burning deep.

silently, he extends his hand, dangling his lit cigarette between his fingers for ephemera to take. )

[ Not for the first time, he thinks of Hunter. How the captain never once yelled in all the years they fought together. Never even raised his voice. Didn't have to. The sergeant was the one who got loud for him. They were a good team that way. But Hunter was the one who kept them all steady, an anchor point in the middle of whatever bullshit nightmare they were trying to survive at any given moment, and Ephemera took that. Kept it, tried to emulate it. Couldn't, in the end. But he remembers now how the captain moved, how he spoke. How people listened to him. He wonders if Hunter would have done this.

Probably not. Hunter was a good tactician. Never took a bet unless he was sure it would net him something worth keeping.

Ephemera takes the cigarette. Presses it between his teeth and inhales. Lets the nicotine burn down, down, down. He doesn't say anything, can't think of the right words to break the silence. He just exhales, blowing smoke, and passes it back. ]

( they stand there, in silence, passing back a cigarette until the stick burns to crumbling ash. felix says nothing for a long time. he can't remember the last time he did this — just existing in stillness, without words or motion. ortez, probably. ortez is his last everything.

has he always been this fucking tired? never noticed it because he never stops? he's tired, he thinks.

he passes the remainder of the cigarette to ephemera, allowing him the last drag, then stares down at his hand again. still shaking, but less. he loosely curls his fingers into his palm and hooks out his pinky, tilted toward a yellow stream of nearby lamplight. his mother's name, inked in neat letters on the side of his finger, a little faded with time. tatiana. )

My ma. Tat'yana. Got it right after I enlisted. When I showed her on a vidcall, she cried and didn't talk to me for six months.

( soft, even with all her fanatical delusions, even at her absolute worst, when she frightened felix more than anything. she cried when he enlisted, too, and clung to him the day he shipped out, begged anyone who would listen not to take him away. too young, she said, teary-eyed, lashes clumped in mascara. still a baby. her little rabbit. her imperfect boy. damned to hell, but he was hers. )

I was seventeen. Thirty-two now. Haven't seen her in a decade.

( not directly, anyway. he's seen her from afar, across crowded streets, in the market as she picked out apples and sweet cherries, through the window of her small two bedroom cottage. she lives in the country now, far away from any ocean. sometimes she looks happy. )

[ For the first time in a very long time, things go truly quiet. Ephemera lets the nicotine settle in him, curl through his lungs. Most of the time he thinks too hard. Gets caught in loops, going round and round the same thing. Twisting himself into knots with all the rage and fucking grief, trying to contend with it all. It's only when he's painting or very drunk that it ever slows and even then, there are limits.

Now, it's quiet.

Ephemera tips his head back, taking one last drag. He holds it for a moment, then exhales. Watches it spiral up, then drops the butt and grinds it down under his armored boot. Tatiana.

Yeah. They know things about each other now, don't they?

He flexes his fingers, idly. Thinking of the rings tattooed around his own fingers. One for each of his team and one, finally, for Connie and everything she might have been. He wanted to carry them. Rings, instead of their names. He never knew Connie's real name, anyway. ]

Did she know you were still alive?

( that's funny. felix scoffs, soft, and tightens his hand into a fist, touching his curled knuckles to his mouth. )

I died on Reach. Twenty-seven. She has my tags.

( the only remaining evidence that her son actually existed, aside from old photographs and vids. anything she didn't burn or destroy in a fit of mania when he left her alone to fend for herself on tribute.

ortez's name came later, years down the line. it feels like a curse now, a promise broken. more than once he's taken a knife to his ring finger in the suffocating dark of his apartment in the down and drunkenly considered flaying the skin to the bone. or cutting it off entirely. )

I don't know how to stop this.

( whatever this is. all of it. )

Edited 2021-09-22 02:51 (UTC)

[ Ephemera can't say he understands. But then, he's never had to leave anyone behind. His family was always at his side, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as the war raged on around them. Whatever he left behind on Eremus faded as the years went on. He was born there and he's never been back. All the friends he had back then are long gone. The woman who raised him might still be alive, but he never wrote to her and as far as he knows, she never wrote to him. Why would she? Her obligations ended the day he turned eighteen - which was, incidentally, the day he shipped off for boot camp.

It happened. It ended. What came next mattered more. That was the family that he'd wanted. That was the grief that killed him. He resurrected himself imperfectly. There are pieces he'll never get back.

He knows he's crazy now. It comes and goes. But it's settled in him. Coiled in deep.

Ephemera tips his head to the side, watching Felix. Funny thing is, he makes that gesture, too. Touches his knuckles to his mouth. He does it when he's anxious. Trying to calm himself. ]

You're in your head too much.

( can't fucking leave it, he thinks. and when he can, it's just as bad. maybe worse.

he presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth and swallows tightly, throat bobbing. this whole thing is wrong. ephemera's calmness in the face of an inevitable catastrophe. felix still fucking being here, allowing this tenuous closeness. he drags his knuckles from his mouth, circling his hand around his neck. focuses on the rapid thrum of his pulse pinned under his thumb. )

Maybe, but at least I know what the fuck is going on.

[ That makes one of them, Ephemera supposes. He hums to himself, rocking back on his heels. Watching Felix, watching how he shifts to grip his throat. And remember how earlier Felix put his hand over Ephemera's and pressed until he started to squeeze. Could've snapped Felix's neck like that. Crushed his throat. Maybe that was the point. Making it quiet. ]

Do you?

( maybe he doesn't understand entirely, but he understands enough. seen enough, too. he can feel ephemera's eyes on him, contemplating him, like he's a thing to be understood instead of a thing to be feared or otherwise avoided. you make sense to me. did he make sense when he allowed ephemera to live repeatedly? when he kissed him and begged him to come?

chorus made sense. ortez made sense until he very abruptly didn't. the way of the fucking universe: survive, at all costs. nothing else matters. no one else matters. you're either exploiter or the exploited. )

Yeah.

( the slow-growing realization that he gives a modicum of a shit, spreading through him like dryrot. there aren't words for that. he doesn't know how to stop that. he doesn't know how to flay that feeling from his ribs and silence it. an inevitable catastrophe.

he squeezes his throat and considers making this violent as his pulse kicks beneath his thumb. force it back. make it make sense.

fuck this. fuck ephemera.

his quiet stillness goes rigid in a dizzying flash, tension running his shoulders taut. icily, he says, ) Go home, asshole. Before someone sees you.

( then – before he can respond – he turns on his heel and leaves. )

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