EPISODE MARIUS

(1)

I

Silia and I grew up together hating Niflheim with the same intensity with which children love their parents. The human officers of the occupation garrison in Ambrosia, though few, were violent and arrogant profiteers who, after the retreat of the Wall, rushed to Lucis to loot and do whatever the hell they liked. Niflheim levied heavy taxes, so we all had a bad time, and the officers confiscated goods as they pleased and used whatever they liked without paying. I remember the daily humiliations, the kicks, the way we were forced to lower our eyes and pick up the pace when we came across them in the street, hoping they would not bother us. Sometimes we'd get lucky, sometimes they made up the most imaginative excuses to teach us a lesson, as they loved to repeat.

We were angry and spiteful, much more than the adults, who tried to continue to survive by bowing their heads. And we escaped with small and naive acts of vandalism which, in retrospect, only exacerbated everyone's living conditions. We'd steal food and cigarettes from Imperial stocks. We'd smear the walls of their barracks with excrement. We'd empty their gas tanks.

One night I proposed to the other kids in the group to enter the Imperial hangar and tear the wheels of their cars. It seemed a fun, exciting idea right then, a little more adult than the usual gimmicks. Everyone pulled back except Silia Hartwood. She was my best friend. She was small, but agile and strong, bold and brave. She had the sharp face, the sly and hungry expression of a street woman, even though she was only eleven years old. My father had been her dad's closest friend before his death, and we had known each other almost forever. She was the only girl in the group, but despite this the others respected her because she was generous and because she had earned that respect with bites and punches.

That night we had bad luck. A sensor that neither of us had seen went off and triggered the alarms. We were forced to hide as the automatic doors of the hangar closed. Silia was reckless, but when three Niff officers, cursing, found the damage and said they would hang the perpetrators of that act of vandalism, she looked at me with a terrified expression, and suddenly I understood two things; the first, that Silia as much as she liked to act tough, was an eleven-year-old girl who weighed perhaps 90 pounds, and the second, that the stunt had been my idea and that it was my duty to bail her out. I told her to run away once they were distracted. She didn't understand right away, and shook her head violently, squeezing my arm. Run away asap, I repeated, and freed myself from her grip. I came out and gave myself up to the Niffs.

I'd be lying now if I said I hadn't been terrified. When the Niff corporal struck my face with his whip and I stopped seeing with my eye, I was sure they would kill me and I almost wet myself. But they didn't kill me. They overwhelmed me with kicks and punches on the ground and dragged me out of the hangar. Compared to all the injuries of the following years, in training and on the front, the beating must not have been that much, but I still remember it as a moment of hellish suffering, probably amplified by panic. I spat out my name, surname and address along with my teeth, and at that point, if they had suspected I wasn't alone, I'm sure I would have sold Silia too.

I don't know when and how she managed to get out of the hangar without being caught. I fainted and found myself at home, on the floor of the entrance, the Niffs yelling at my father, my father listening with his head bowed. An eternity later they left. Only then, as my father, after laying me down on the sofa, went out to ask Frida for help to give me first aid, did I remember Silia, and I confessed to him that she was with me in the hangar and that I didn't know what had happened to her.

Some time later – a few minutes or an hour might have passed – my father returned with Frida. She was pissed as hell. I asked them about Silia, and Frida replied that she had come home too and had locked herself in her room. We couldn't go on like this, she said, without looking anyone in the face, slamming on the sofa the medical tool bag that had been Karl Hartwood's. Silia always said that my father had been kind of a dad to her too, but I had never been able to say the same about Frida, even though I had never known my mother. We couldn't go on like this, she repeated, to me, to herself or to my father. You'll have to get over it sooner or later, those were the last words I heard out before she sedated me.

I stayed in bed for a week. The Niffs kept their word, for once, and they didn't come to get me and hang me, but word got around, and people started avoiding us. I could see with my eye again, luckily, but I was left with a scar that I would carry around for my whole life. The first of many. Ten days after I recovered - more or less - my father announced that we would leave Ambrosia and that we would try to be admitted to the Crown City, and that Silia and Frida would come with us. Instead of being happy, I told my dad he was a fucking coward and we were running away like dogs with tails between their legs. Instead of breaking my face, my father smiled bitterly and replied that he was indeed a coward. He wasn't Karl Hartwood and he never would be.

II

Our lives changed little in Insomnia. We lived in a free city, without enemy soldiers on the streets, but now we were refugees, beggars mercifully welcomed by the King. Not even my father had a clear idea of what awaited us in the Crown City, but we soon found it out.

There were two cities. One, from the Citadel to the road that ran all around the Ancient Wall – the Ring Road, they called it – was the real Insomnia: wealthy citizens lived there in buildings so tall that I never thought they could stand up alone. The other city, from the Ring Road to the New Wall, half city and half countryside, was the suburbs where poor citizens and immigrants lived. King Mors had scaled the Wall from Lucis' outer borders to Insomnia; no one doubted what would happen if and when King Regis was forced to reduce its size again.

Thinking back now, after seeing how people were faring outside the Wall, our district wasn't that bad; and since Ambrosia seemed to have stopped fifty years or so before Insomnia – or perhaps it was Insomnia that had jumped fifty years ahead of the rest of Lucis – we were at ease in the suburbs with their low houses, the few old cars, the televisions that in the rest of the city had been replaced by computers. We had been given accommodation and unlike others we never were hungry, but we had to roll up our sleeves to help out our parents. Both Silia and I had always had a good sensitivity to magic, but hers was much more pronounced, and she soon learned to use spontaneous sources of elemancy to prepare magical flasks. When word got around, strangers began to approach her on the street to buy them. They probably were up to no good, but Silia didn't ask questions, and the City Guard, even though it came close to her several times, never managed to pinch her.

While Silia developed magical power, I developed muscles because I was of good physical constitution and they often gave me heavy tasks. In two years, my stature grew by almost twelve inches and I found myself at thirteen with the body of a sixteen-year-old. Silia's did not change too much, however; she remained small and slender as a cat, but her face, her hips, her breasts, slowly began to become those of a woman. We were becoming adults, but the relationship between us did not change - Silia was somewhat a sister to me, even though we didn't share our blood, and so was I to her.

My father occasionally worked as a reporter. Articles about the war, as he had written in Ambrosia to get them to Insomnia. It was his contacts in the Capital that got us admitted to the city as refugees, skipping a lot of pages on the waiting list, and – I discovered this later – to let Silia and Frida enter, he had to declare that they were his wife and daughter. He'd write by hand, because we didn't have enough money to buy a computer, and actually we talked very little because I didn't come home until night.

Frida, on the other hand, could not find work; in Ambrosia she had helped Karl in his clinic and then had managed it by herself, but she had no equivalent qualification, and in any case no Insomnia hospital would have hired an immigrant. It was Silia who struggled between legal and illegal jobs to get them going. Her relationship with her mother was strained, but I never heard her complain that she was providing for both of them, not even when we were alone.

At night, Silia and I sometimes took a couple of hours to sneak out of the district. There was no law to forbid it, but we were not well received by the crown citizens and the City Guard, outside our neighbourhood, and they did not give us rest. We walked up to a hill on the outskirts from which you could clearly see, in the distance, the imposing bright silhouette of the Citadel. We sat on the ground side by side, but we hardly talked. We smoked silently a few cigarettes looking at the lights of Insomnia's beating heart. We had seen it on TV when we were in Ambrosia, of course, but part of us didn't believe such a building could really exist. Neither of us ever said it, but I was sure it made us feel safe, even if we weren't within. Such a monolith couldn't collapse. We would be safe in Insomnia.

~~~XV~~~

The war had receded, but it had not disappeared. Magitek technology was advancing more and more and had almost completely replaced human intervention. The regular army was withdrawn from almost all the provinces, as had happened to Ambrosia. I clearly remember the press conference that King Regis held for the occasion, the members of the Council behind him. Our current forces are unable to counter the new Imperial discoveries and we do not want to sacrifice other men, he admitted. This is not a surrender, but a temporary retreat. We are working to find a solution. Who knows if there had been a press conference even when he had withdrawn the defense from Ambrosia. Who knows if, hundreds of miles away from where people like Karl Hartwood had taken up arms and stood up with all his might to defend his land, safely in the Citadel Ceremonies Hall, the King had bowed his head in apology in front of cameras.

In 741 rumors spread that the King meant to put together a special army unit to be trained specifically to counter the Magitek infantry. My father told me that as a fun fact, without knowing what he would set in motion.

"At last, the King has realized that we can only make up for the technological deficit with magic," he told me.

"What do you mean?"

"He wants to train kids to learn how to use magic in war." I believe that at that moment the idea that Silia and I could be potential candidates did not occur to him at all.

I didn't tell Silia, but I started collecting info from my father and from the newspapers. A big shot of from the Citadel would select the kids for the program – his name was Titus Drautos. He was a war veteran, and it was said that, in addition to being a skilled strategist, he was himself a deadly fighter capable of using magic.

I took courage and introduced myself to the Citadel. My hatred for Niflheim, for what they had done to us for so many years had never subsided, as my scar reminded me every time I looked at myself in the mirror. My legs were shaking when I entered the lobby; I was dirty, messy, and with a week's beard in the hope of being able to pass myself off as an older boy. What the fuck am I doing here, I thought. They'll laugh at me. They'll never let me pass. For this elite commando they'll choose the elite.

I did understand shit. The nobles of Insomnia would never send their heirs to war, gifted in magic or not. Their offspring would become Crownsguards, well trained by the famous Immortal, sure, but safe within the Wall. Defensive military force, they called it. Instead, to die on the front they sent those no one would miss like immigrants, orphans from the provinces, beggars from the suburbs. And I could also have spared myself the trouble of letting my beard grow, because no one older than fifteen was admitted to the training of the first group and many were eleven or twelve.

When I said why I was there they let me pass right away, and Captain Drautos didn't laugh at me. On the contrary, he examined me very seriously. He questioned me for an hour, sifting through my life and my motivations. What had happened to me in Ambrosia in the hangar of the Imperial garrison – I didn't tell him about Silia – seemed to intrigue him. He appreciated my physical structure, it seemed to me, but he was more interested in my magical ability, which he tested with an energy crystal. Without thinking, I told him that I knew a girl from Ambrosia who had a much stronger magical sensitivity than mine. I even ventured to mention the flasks. He asked me why she hadn't come with me. I replied that she did not know about my decision and that, if he agreed to meet her, I would take her to the Citadel. Captain Drautos told me he would go himself, and I told him where to find her.

Only at the end he asked me if I had parents and if they agreed I would enlist. I said that I no longer had a mother and that my father did not know yet. The Captain replied that if he decided to accept me, he would take care of everything. Only months later, at the Training Facility, did I learn from other recruits that their parents' blessings had been bought with Kingdom money and that what they passed on to our families while we were in training – and that it was not remotely comparable to what they would pay us years later for our services in the war – had quelled virtually every complaint.

It was not necessary to buy my father. When I told him, he just asked me if I was serious. I answered yes. He nodded and said nothing more. Always apathetic, Greg, ever since my mother died, not to mention his best friend Karl. After those griefs, nothing seemed to make a difference for him – the occupation of Ambrosia, the transfer to Insomnia, the fact that his son would enlist. But when I added that the Captain would evaluate Silia too, he asked me if I had gone mad. I replied that Silia would have run to war even before me, if the Captain had deemed her suitable. He retorted that that was not the point, that Silia was a girl and moreover she was a twig. I asked him what kind of future he envisaged for her in the refugee district. A future, he replied. In prison, if she doesn't die, I completed for him, 'cause sooner or later, with that business of flasks, they'll catch her, or she'll blow herself and half a district up before. And you know better than me that sooner or later the war will come here too.

Silia was examined by the Captain and was not discarded, but at the price of a definitive break with Frida. She came to stay with us while we waited to know our future, and after knowing our future, while we waited to move to the Training Facility. She slept with me, and at night I felt her tremble, but I never hugged her because she would have noticed that I was trembling too. We were thirteen, we had signed up for a training that would send us to war, but even though we were young and desperate we weren't fool enough not to know what that meant. We would die. Neither of us had any illusions in this sense.

III

The facility where we would live for the next five years was a spartan complex in the eastern suburbs of Insomnia.

"It's a military base," I told Silia, who was resting her hands on the glass of the bus carrying our group, as the driver got out to open an unsupervised gate.

"Why, were you expecting a school?" she teased me. She was excited, I could see that, and during the trip, unlike many of our future comrades, she had hardly opened her mouth.

As the bus rolled on, I stood beside her to look out the window. Low and gray barracks, cisterns, a couple of turrets, large empty spaces that certainly were used for training. The regular army of Insomnia must have trained there once, when there was still a regular army. My father told me he had met some veterans. There is no turning back, he had warned me bitterly. War fucks your head. It wouldn't happen to me, I thought.

I had expected fatigue, pain and sacrifices to be endured without a sound. I hadn't even come close to what was required of us all on a daily basis.

The alarm was at five in the morning. Nobody threw us out of bed; we had to learn how to do it ourselves, and soon the time of surprise night inspections came, and you had a minute to be found outside the barracks already dressed and ready for review. We had twenty minutes for a shower and breakfast, then we'd show up for the morning training session.

When they put the training schedule in my hand, I was shocked at the multitude of things we had to learn. I thought they would teach us how to fight and channel magic. Fighting, I discovered only then, is a generic term that I had always used up to that moment and that did not do justice to all its forms; hand to hand combat lessons were provided; fencing lessons; lessons on how to use blunt weapons; ranged weapons – bows and crossbows, rifles, sniper rifles; there were even lessons on how to spot, build and use improper weapons. Magic lessons were planned too, of course; none of us knew how to use it voluntarily and correctly, so the first few months we learned to summon and control it. The lessons of offensive, defensive, support magic came later.

"Oh, by Odin's cock," I whispered to Silia. "It never ends. Look here: driving, maintenance and sabotage of military vehicles; military tactics; study of the bestiary known so far; first aid; survival and orientation."

"Computer systems breach," Silia continued reading. "I don't even know what a computer looks like."

"Don't be impressed by all that stuff and big words," Kyle Deann, the war veteran who looked after us, was saying. A bit grim as a babysitter, but we found out he was less bad than many others. "At the end of the training, if you get there, you'll have everything so stuck in your head that you'll apply it without even thinking 'bout it, and it'll save your life."

"I bet," I whispered again, "that the Crownsguards and the City Guards aren't trained on a tenth of this stuff."

"That's why it's not the Crownsguards and the City Guards who are fighting this war," said Tredd Furia, a red-haired boy a little older than me who had arrived with our group. He too had grown up in our refugee district, but we had never talked that much until he had approached me a few days after knowing that I had also been accepted.

~~~XV~~~

The training was fierce for everyone, hell for some. Silia barely kept pace, but with her head held high. I was envious of the tenacity with which she underwent the most exhausting workouts, of the pride with which she never complained of blisters, pain, injuries and fatigue. There were other girls among the recruits, but many did not reach the end of the first year; in addition to the greater fatigue due to their weaker build, because the instructors did not discount anyone in any discipline, they were targeted by male comrades. The first two months pissed me off. The third I began to think that after all it was none of my business and they had to grow some balls. The fourth I got involved with Tredd and Sonitus, other recruits, in jokes and pranks. It was fun, after all, and nobody got hurt at first. I felt inadequate for the training program that seemed designed for supermen, I, who had never picked up a weapon to use it, and it was a way to relieve the mental and physical stress that I suffered. Furthermore, I was flattered to be the object of the attention of those guys who were a little older than me, and I wanted to be accepted and respected.

Silia was always so tired and focused that I could no longer recognize her, but on the other hand, after a few months from the start of the training I found it hard to recognize myself. Tredd and Sonitus laughed at her getting stuck in continuing her training when it was clear that she couldn't do it; she was a twig, they said, and she would be hurt so badly, sooner or later, that she would go home to cry to her mother. But Silia never cried, not in front of me at least, nor, that I knew, in front of someone else; if her face was wet, her eyes red, it was only sweat, fatigue, a fury bordering fanaticism.

Six months after the start of the training we ran the first simulation in the field. The recruits, who by then were already far fewer than those initially selected as suitable, were divided into squads and taken to an isolated area beyond the Wall. We had to fight on two opposing sides, obeying the orders of two commanders and using training weapons that hurt and smoke bombs that made our eyes water for days. Silia and I fought on the same side, but we barely crossed paths. When it got dark and some daemons appeared, I panicked and made one mistake after another. The instructors would probably never let us die in training, but we didn't know it for sure. Silia, on the other hand, kept a cool head.

Some days after, Basil Hershel, the military tactics instructor, handed us the scores in sealed envelopes. As he handed the envelope to Silia, who happened to be sitting not far from me that day, he patted her shoulder, and said something to her. Silia, unperturbed, saluted, but when Hershel walked away, she opened the envelope and gave a radiant smile, the first I had seen in a long time. A few seconds later she looked up and noticed me. She stood up, amicably, and came to ask me how it had gone, leaning over to look at the contents of my envelope. I removed it abruptly from her gaze and told her not to bust my balls and rather try putting on a little muscle, or she would be a burden, and I called her, for the first time, by her surname, as the others used to do. Tredd and Sonitus whistled and laughed at her. Silia looked at me as she had never looked at me before: surprised, angry, sad. But she instantly recovered her aplomb. She shrugged, showed her finger to Tredd and Sonitus and said to me in a dry voice, "Fuck you, Marius, get yourself a chamomile tea if you're on one of those days of the month." She turned her back on me and walked away. She always did this, Silia, when they tormented her. After reacting to the insults, she walked away with her head straight forward, showing a total disinterest at the prospect of being hit from behind. An attitude that made people love her even less.

~~~XV~~~

Early in my sophomore, one night Tredd fucked me, more or less against my will. I was scarcely fifteen, he was sixteen, and he had managed to retrieve two cigarettes somewhere. In the night, while everyone was asleep, we sneaked out of the dorms to smoke them. We reached the firearms training camp and he, on the fifth attempt, managed to summon a small fire to light them. Few could do it already, and he was very proud of it. We smoked for a while, talking about this and that, poking fun at a mate or insulting an instructor. The cigarette was long gone when Tredd placed a hand on my shoulder and lowered my head toward his as if to share a secret. Nothing new or strange, gestures like that were common among us male recruits. What was new and strange was that he put his other hand on my crotch.

"C'mon, man!" I joked, annoyed. "What's wrong with you?"

He winked, smiling. "C'mon, Marius, don't tell me you haven't thought of it too sometimes."

"Thought of what?" I forced myself to keep joking, trying to pull away. "I like pussy, Tredd, we've talked about it a lot of times."

He shrugged. "And there is very little here. Come on, it's not like being fags. You said you like pussy, me too. It's just to have some fun."

I stared at him for a moment longer, and I realized that the time he would laugh and say 'you believed it, you asshole! Look at your face!' wouldn't come. He had started moving his hand on the crotch of my pants, slowly, and my throat was dry from embarrassment, from surprise, and because - without me wanting it - my body was starting to react. I was in that period of my life when I got it up for everything.

"Stop it, Tredd," I said, but I couldn't move. "I'm not having fun at all."

"Seems to me you are."

I could have stopped him as he put his hand inside my pants. Instead, I let him stroke my cock, because nobody – whatever I told others, even to him – had ever done it to me, and at that moment, I didn't give a shit that it was a man and not a girl. I let Tredd stroke my cock while he stroked his – basically nobody saw us; I had glimpsed others doing it when they thought nobody saw them, it was just to let off steam.

But when Tredd overtook me and kissed me, rubbing on me, pulling my pants down, I got really pissed off. It was one thing to let him touch me, another what Tredd clearly had in mind and that I wouldn't let him do it for any of the Six.

"Marius, stop being a pussy. You like it, right?"

"Tredd, get off me or I'll break your face," I growled.

"Come on, you're scared it'll hurt? They beat us in training from early morning to night."

"It's not that. Tredd, I'll tell you just one more time: stop it."

"What if I don't? You'll start screaming like a little girl?"

I tried to punch him. He blocked my fist. My head hit him full, however, but Tredd didn't let go of me. For over a year, after all, they'd been teaching us to endure pain and not to be distracted from fighting when we got hit. We fought for a while. I realized with a sense of bitter humiliation that Tredd was physically stronger than me, or more trained in hand-to-hand. We fought for a while, but then I gave in, because the more we panted, the more we rubbed, the more aroused I was. I gave in, of my own free will, pretending to struggle for a little while longer. I tried to decide quickly if I would get out with more dignity intact by letting him believe he had taken me by force, or by letting him know that he could only do it because it was okay with me.

Tredd didn't seem to care. Panting, he pulled down his pants, spat on his hands, and I felt his fingers inside, annoying but not as painful as I thought, and then his cock. That hurt. I stiffened, trying to pull away, but he grabbed me by the hips and started pushing. I felt more and more a tearing sensation.

"Fuck," Tredd said in a faint voice. "Fuck."

"Shit, Tredd, you hurt me."

I didn't think he would give a damn, but instead he cared. One of Tredd's hands let go of my hips and surrounded my cock again. I didn't think it would stand up again in that situation, but it did. I didn't think Tredd's cock in my ass would give me anything but pain, but it did.

"Fuck," Tredd kept panting.

I came, and it was like a blackout. Tredd continued to push for another ten seconds, then I felt filled with something warm and sticky.

We remained panting, both on our knees. And then, unexpectedly, I heard Tredd laugh.

"Fuck, man," he said, his voice still broken. "For being someone who wanted to back down, you enjoyed it a lot, huh."

I got up, still half naked, and violently grabbed his jaw. "If you tell anyone, Tredd, I will kill you. Not kidding. I will kill you."

Something in my face must have convinced him that I was serious. Tredd raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Easy, Marius. I'm not dying for people to know, either. What we do between comrades remains between comrades, right?"

I started to get dressed, and he did the same. Tredd seemed relaxed, and it didn't surprise me; once you stick your cock in a hole, who cares if it's a man or a woman. As for me, my ass and pride ached, and I still couldn't believe I'd let him.

"Shall we go back, Marius?"

"Go back alone."

I needed to get his and my own cum off me, and besides, I wasn't sure I could talk to him without smashing his face.

Under the shower, almost without noticing, I began to cry. It hadn't happened since the Niffs had caught me at eleven. It was all fucking wrong. That inhuman training just starting, the daemons out in the dark, the fuck with Tredd. I leaned my forehead against the tiles and sobbed. I cried, shamelessly, because I had done far more shameful things that night, and I thought of Ambrosia, my old low brick house with the garden bordering that of Silia's parents. I thought of the Niffs we would make pay for it. I thought of the refugee district in Insomnia, our Citadel Square. I thought of my father. I thought of Aeliana from the refugee district, who I liked, she had even kissed me with her tongue before I left for the Training Facility. I thought of Silia, because all those things were long gone, while Silia was there, every day, sharing what I was going through. Minus Tredd's cock in her ass, or so I hoped. I clung to the thought of Silia. I couldn't tell her what had happened, of course. It would have made her sick.

~~~XV~~~

I knew that almost every night, after the curfew, Silia would sneak out and go to one of the fields. It was usually the farthest from the dorms, the one used for elemancy training.

She was always so self-involved and persistent that she would never listen to me if I interrupted her training, so I waited two hours. It didn't bother me to stay awake in bed because, despite being tired, I often had trouble sleeping. I got up in the dark, put on my shoes – by now the time of surprise inspections was over – and walked out.

I found her exactly where I expected. She was resting – or perhaps she had fallen asleep – on the sidelines, her back against a marble bench. When I got close enough, I saw that her eyes were open. She had already heard me coming.

We looked at each other in silence for a moment; we hadn't talked for a while, the two of us alone. We had drifted away. By now, outside of training, I was constantly with Tredd, Sonitus, and Axis, and she was totally focused on herself with the exception, perhaps, of Sarah, a little blonde girl who had been following her since we got at the Facility.

"What are you doing here, Marius?" she asked, defensive. I was not surprised; I had been quite hateful toward her lately.

"Couldn't sleep. I sneaked out for a walk, then saw someone in the dark and wondered who it was," I lied. I sat on the ground next to her, as we did in Insomnia and as we continued to do in the early days of training. I thought back to the nights before leaving, when she had broken up with her mother and slept in my bed. We were thrilled and terrified at the idea of what lay ahead. I was still terrified.

"How's Greg?" she asked, as if seeing me reminded her of the refugee district as well.

"He's fine, I'd say, as far as you can be fine in that gutter. But soon he'll be able to leave." I gave my father all the money I received for training. I didn't need it. My father, on the other hand, would soon have a house in a decent neighborhood. Nobody rents to immigrants outside the suburbs, even if they have the money, but they can buy. "What 'bout you? Out again for Silia Hartwood's special training?" I tried to joke.

She nodded, serious. She was so close that I could see all the shades of the bluish bruise on her eye. Who knew if it had happened in training or if she had fought with someone. Maybe it had been Tredd himself. "I was catching my breath before going back to bed."

Silia would understand how I felt, I thought, because she too was going through hell. I had tried to protect her in the early days, but we had started arguing about exactly that. Three months after the training started, in the locker room, I had stood between her and Remington, a rookie who had taken to bullying her, and she had punched me in front of everyone. I hadn't reacted. If you take my defense, she had yelled in my face later, shoving me, no one'll respect me. For a moment, for the first time in my life since we were no longer two snot-nosed children, I had felt the urge to hit her. And how much do you think they'll respect me, I had retorted, hiding my hands in my pockets so as not to use them, now that they've seen that a 90-pound girl can punch me and treat me like that in front of everyone? I hadn't taken up her defense any more after that day, but now she was doing very well on her own, as far as I knew, breaking noses and jaws without warning is a good way to gain respect.

I ventured to lay a hand on her knee. Physical contact between us was never lacking when we were children, but it hadn't happened for over a year and I felt odd. "You can't go on like this. The training's already scheduled to squeeze us to the maximum. You can't do more."

"I can, as you see."

"If you get hurt or collapse from fatigue, you're out."

"I'll take the risk. If I don't, sooner or later I'm out anyway."

She was stubborn as always. I kept silent, because that moment, she and I alone in the dark, was precious, and I didn't want to ruin it. Why on Eos had we let things degenerate to that point between us? Was it too late to get back what we once had? I was a fucking idiot. Silia was my friend, not some Tredd or Sonitus.

"Let me see." I knelt in front of her, taking her right arm. It was no longer as thin as it used to be, I could no longer surround it with my fingers, but it was not the arm of a military man and it never would have been. I began to feel her muscles: brachioradialis, brachialis, triceps, biceps, deltoid. She let me do it. "It's a strong arm, Silia, what are you complaining about?"

"Don't bullshit me, Marius," she retorted. "I can't wield the broadsword for more than a minute or two."

My hand slid up to her wrist – that, I could still completely surround. "We're not here for weight-lifting. We're here to fight, and broadswords are not the only way to do it."

"I know that," she whispered, and I felt her shiver. "But Magellano always says the Captain will end up dismissing me. And even if I reach the end of the training, I'm afraid of dying in war if I'm not strong enough. I don't want to die, Marius. Not... uselessly."

I squeezed her wrist, leaned against her side, and kissed her. I didn't think I'd ever kiss Silia. My father would have had a heart attack if he had known.

"Oh, for the Six, Marius!" she exclaimed, struggling without a moment of hesitation. "You kidding me? You're basically my fucking brother. If you want to try these... sorts of things, there are other girls."

I got pissed off for two reasons. First, because I had recently tried these sorts of things too much, and not with girls, and second, because I wasn't her fucking brother. "I'm not your brother!"

"I don't give a fuck!" she retorted. She had gotten a lot more foul-mouthed since we were there, but never in front of the instructors or, worse still, the Captain. She rubbed her mouth as if I had spat in her face. "For the Six, Marius, what's in your fucking head?"

I threw up almost everything on her. "I too am afraid to die, that's what is in my fucking head, Silia, and I too have a fucking fear that after five years of this grueling training I might die after five minutes in war. This training program is hell, and I'm shattered, yet I can't sleep at night. I dream of the daemons they tell us all the time. I dream of magiteks that split me open or explode on me. Every night I wonder why I enlisted and, worse, why I brought you in too."

"You didn't force me! I want to be here!"

"Of course, you see, throwin' up blood from fatigue even after the end of the day!" I lashed at her. I pursed my lips, trying once again to gain her complicity. I desperately wanted her to understand. I was in a furious need. "I have a fucking fear, Silia. Don't you have it?"

"Of course I have it! I told you! Everyone has it! Stop complaining so much!"

It hurt. "I can't. I feel I'm going crazy here, and the only connection I have with what is outside, with what I had before, is you."

Her eyes softened, that look that once was almost only for me, and for a moment I thought it was all right. I gently grabbed her chin to kiss her again, but she pulled away. "Fuck no, Marius, not like that. I love you, you know, even if lately... but not like that, I can't. I can't do it."

"Why? If you need time, Silia, if you don't feel like it now, if you're not ready, no problem. I'll wait. I just need to know that..."

She shook her head resolutely. "No, Marius, no! Neither now nor later. As long as I can remember, you're always been there. You're not my brother, it's true, but it's as if you were. We grew up together. It's not a matter of being ready. Get it out of your head. Never gonna happen."

I looked at her. I could do as Tredd had done the night before, jump on her and force it. Who knows if she too would have resisted for a while and then let me do it, or if she would have resisted until the very end. Probably the second, if only for her fucking pride. I could do as Tredd had done, and I was stronger, and for a moment I imagined squeezing her wrists over her head as I fucked her. I felt like shit just for entertaining the thought, but also pissed off because she didn't want to give me what I needed – Silia, with whom I had shared everything since we were children. I never denied her anything, I risked my life for her, I had just opened up to her, and she didn't want to give me this, a hold on while I was sinking.

I got up. "Oh well," I replied, slipping back into the costume she hated most: Gaunt's, the asshole, Furia and Bellum's buddy. "Too bad, Kitty. Since you're not in the mood, I'll go bed."

"Marius, what the fuck is wrong with you?" she spat.

I already told her, what the fuck was wrong with me, and she didn't understand, or she had understood perfectly well and didn't care. My chest ached with anger. What the fuck was wrong with me, indeed, letting my guard down like that, lowering myself to beg for support from her? I didn't need Silia Hartwood. I would have made it by myself.

"Well, I was in a mood for fuck, Hartwood, and I did some scene. 'Night."

"Fuck you, Marius. I can't recognize you anymore."

I couldn't recognize myself anymore either. I shrugged, raising my hand in a mocking gesture of goodbye, and went back to bed.

IV

I made it, and I made it by myself. Those were tough years, much harder than those in Ambrosia, physically and mentally, but they prepared me for the worst that would come next, in war. To find the strength to get up from my cot every morning, I forced myself to isolate from everything. I'd train, laugh, eat, fuck, but it was like I put some kind of autopilot on and my real self had retreated somewhere. I found myself at the end of the day almost without knowing what I had done. I managed to take the art of letting things slip on me to the highest level. If I didn't notice them – the pain, the fatigue, the humiliations – they couldn't break me.

When, three years later, we went to the front, Silia and I barely spoke to each other. She was one of the fourteen female Kingsglaives to pass the training, plus she had managed to injure Magellano Reiner during the final fencing trial. To get close enough to hit the war veteran who had trained us for five years by making us spit blood, vomit and teeth, to catch him with his guard down, she had let herself be pierced by his sword on purpose. In a non-vital spot, of course, but when the distance between a vital spot and a non-vital spot is an inch or two and the hand holding the weapon is not yours, we were beyond gambling: this was mental illness.

Ill or not, Silia had risked kicking the bucket, but had earned the Captain's respect. Magellano, on the other hand – Magellano Reiner, who had beaten our heads, hit us in the back, fractured our legs and arms to inculcate his favorite maxim until you flake out to the ground you can still fight – had protested that a demented person like her, ready to transform a fencing trial into a duel to the death, ready to die literally for nothing, had to be kicked out of the program. The Captain didn't share his opinion, and of course it was up to him to decide.

Less than two years later, after surviving such an accident that, I had believed, would have forced her to retire, after becoming the key man who had allowed us to regain Bors after challenging the Captain, backed by the most cohesive squad of all, Silia Hartwood was an institution among the Kingsglaives, almost on a par with Nyx Ulric, the Galahdian, who despite having arrived at the Facility just on the third year of training had proved to be the best of us. The Captain held her in high esteem, and only by virtue of this did he not expel her from the Glaives on three or four occasions, as she would have deserved. He entrusted her with the most delicate missions, assigned to her squad the most difficult rookies to manage, always inquired about her injuries.

No one had more time or desire for pranks and teasing, not since we started dying, but in any case, no one would ever have dared to target her again. Even Tredd no longer troubled her, even since their guerrilla had degenerated into a fight that had involved everyone, even those who had not taken part in it, and which had resulted in what would go down in history as the Teachers' Week Off.

The Teachers' Week Off began with a fucking prank of Tredd, actually less violent than many others and which everyone suffered in rotation, not just Silia: the sperm in the boots. It did not go on as usual. This time Silia flipped out, and without warning, boots in hand, hurled herself on Tredd with such fury that no one could foresee or stop her, much less Tredd himself. Silia pinned his neck between her shins in a textbook clutch that would have made Saul Harris come in his pants out of pride if he had been there, and twisted both his arms behind his back. It was late in the night, after the curfew, so everyone watched. Silia ordered Tredd to wipe her boots with his tongue. Tredd replied that he would rather kill her. Silia repeated that if he didn't wipe her boots with his tongue, she would break both of his arms. Tredd replied that he would make her pay very dearly. Silia broke his left arm without blinking. She would have broken his right too, I'm sure, if finally someone, Sonitus and Axis, hadn't moved to stop her. Only then Sarah Helias, Hans Castor and Balthier Carson moved as well and the fight broke out.

I still don't have a precise idea of who participated and who took cover. It was no longer just a matter between Silia and Tredd, of course. The din called the instructors who beat everyone, including those who hadn't even gotten out of bed, and Tredd wasn't the only one to suffer fractures. But still it didn't end there. Drautos himself was thrown out of bed and made us pay for it bitterly; he said that, since we had behaved like animals, he would treat us like animals and shut us up in a zoo. And so he did; he declared ordinary training suspended for a week and closed us in the dorms. He said he would not let us die of hunger and thirst just because the King and the Council would not be happy with it, but otherwise they would leave us on our own for a week. At the end of which, he wanted to be clear, there would be no disciplinary consequences for anyone, in any case. He didn't give a damn about whoever had started the fight.

It was an unreal week. The first two days no one complained, indeed, for the first time in two years we were able to catch our breath from the exhausting routine that was imposed on us every day. We splinted Tredd's arm and shoulder, and he didn't speak for at least a day and a half. The humiliation had been stinging, but he carefully chose the corner of the dorm farthest from Silia and stayed there all week. Silia hadn't come out of the brawl and beating less battered. I later learned that she had two broken ribs, and she didn't provoke him either. They both knew, we all knew, that if they got close, they would kill each other with their bare hands.

From the third day on, including hygienic conditions, the dormitory truly became a zoo. Inactivity made us nervous. Enmities revived. Drautos' reassurance that there would be no consequences for anyone lifted all inhibitions from us. I realized this later, but it was a brutal lesson from the Captain to teach us what happens when there are no rules, like in war. In that week characters emerged, grievances were vented, groups began to form. Someone cordoned off the younger recruits. There was some rape, I learned later. Many, including myself, stood aside, ready to react in case of danger. Still others, including Sonitus, took the opportunity to let others know who commanded, or who wanted to command. The little groups set up watches, as we would have done in the war years later, otherwise no one would have slept for fear of being attacked.

On the fourth day, Mendez, a seventeen-year-old big guy who had been stabbed in the groin, got worse and started having convulsions. Someone called the instructors, but no one came. When they brought lunch and were told that there was a seriously injured person, they replied that it was not their business until the end of the week. Leighton and Matt, Mendez's buddies, realized that he would not make it to the seventh day and crawled on their knees to Alfher, the first – and until then the only one – who had learned to cast healing magic, and begged him to do something. Alfher had been bullied by Mendez practically since he arrived, but he put his grudges aside and managed to produce a heal that saved Mendez's life, and keep him stable until the end of the week. At that point they all settled down and the dormitory stopped looking like a trench.

When the Teachers' Week Off ended, the instructors reopened the dormitory and told us to clean ourselves before the morning roll-out, those who could walk, and took care of the injured. None of them, including Drautos, spoke of the brawl, no one mentioned the Teachers' Week Off, not even with a cliché like Let that be a lesson to you, no one wanted to know who had hurt whom. What happened during those seven days remained among us recruits, but nine voluntarily abandoned the training program, and Mendez was forced to retire. Of course, the disagreements between the recruits didn't stop suddenly, but we all learned to set ourselves limits. We were no longer riotous kids fighting in the street; in that facility they were turning us into war machines, and we could have killed each other.

Not even the Teachers' Week Off, however, could prepare us for what we would see in war. The five years of training were awful for everyone, but no one would have ever imagined that there was anything worse. Well, there was; in training, no matter how tormented, harassed and mistreated, we did not seriously risk our lives, on the front it was quite another story.

Our squads became our families. I had been assigned to the same as Tredd, Sonitus and Axis – whoever had formed them, and I bet the Captain put a big hand there, had taken into account not just the balance between skills and fighting specializations, but also characters, personal sympathies and even the birth land – and over the years they became, in some way, more than brothers to me. I don't know how many times they saved my ass risking their own life, and I did the same for them. They were arrogant, aggressive, misogynist, and the training made me so barbarous that I became so too, without finding anything wrong with it. I got pissed off about a trifle. I had denied my weakness of that night with such determination – stop complaining, Silia had told me – that the others' made me angry. The mistake of a comrade, the whining of another, made my hands itch. I started to drink by myself to endure all the crap around us everyday, and to take drugs to endure pain and fatigue. I wouldn't do it when it could endanger me of my comrades, of course - I didn't want to die.

One night I left the camp to drink alone. If the Captain caught me, I had no idea what might have happened to me, but I couldn't help it. That day a Niff offensive had caught us so off guard and in a field so unfavorable that we had suffered several losses, including Gilberg, a teammate whom I was – despite myself – fond of. They had assigned him to my squad with the second group, he was still sixteen, and I had promised myself that I would keep an eye on him. It hadn't been enough. He was dead, and what is worse, he had died after hours of agony in the camp infirmary. No treatment or magic could do something for his wounds. I was torn as if they had gutted me.

My memories of that night come and go like when you turn the light on and off in a dark room. I remember Silia, but even today I don't know what she was doing there, if she happened by chance or if she came looking for me specifically. I remember being bloody ashamed of being surprised at such a moment of prostration. Maybe she even tried to say something kind to me - who knows? I remember me yelling at her something. I remember my fingers around her throat as I pushed her into a tree with my pelvis. In the next memory, I am on the ground in a pool of blood while Silia is jumping on my left arm. My uniform pants are pulled down to my knees. Then I don't remember anything, probably for a couple of hours.

Whatever really happened, I think Silia kept it to herself without even telling her comrades, and so did I, of course. She could have broken both of my arms, even killed me, but she didn't. She never spoke to me again, unless forced by mission requirements, and always as if she were talking to a disgusting stranger.

After a first period of black shame, due to the fact that I had laid my hands on a woman, worse, Silia Hartwood, and that I had also been beaten, I began to minimize. After all, I hardly remembered anything – maybe I'd just tried to kiss her and she'd overreacted. Years before, the night after Tredd had fucked me, when I kissed her and she refused me, I had thought about it, to force on her, but I was ashamed at the very thought. I couldn't really have done it.