(A/N: I am a currently serving conscript soldier, so expect updates to be on a monthly basis. At best.
Dedicated to the writing community of r/ac, who looked upon my lunacy with utter horror and occasionally provided helpful input. I love you guys.)
IRRIGO
("I is for IRRIGO. No one remembers why. Irrigo colours the forgotten corners of home.")
Judite still couldn't believe the place she had managed to afford. Her and her parents had certainly made an effort to scrounge up any spare bit of money they had lying around to throw into her dream, and it appeared that the profits of their family trade hadn't disappointed. Admittedly, she didn't need a fancy place to make her dream come true, but it was certainly a perk.
Goddammit. She'll probably have to survive on microwave dinners for the rest of eternity, knowing how expensive apartments in general were in the capital.
Plastering a smile on her face, she scooped up her luggage and shuffled inside with a quick nod to the burly, tattooed man that opened the door for her. That was going to take some getting used to.
Of course, like some sign of fate, something had to go wrong. It was almost comical, really. Judite actually considered turning right around and asking for the soonest train back out to the countryside. Nope, she's sure, she'll tell the ticket master. Dream dead and gone forever.
Because it had to be a sign, didn't it? Why else would somebody like him be her doorman?
(A man clearly from the favelas, almost exactly like the stereotypes that had been drummed into her mind. Dark skin, covered with tattoos, and a head that bore trailing cornrow braids draped over the nape of his neck like vulpine tails.
Dangerous, her mind screamed at her. Untrustworthy. Almost certainly a gangster or criminal or some sorts.
Stereotypes led to biases. Biases coloured first impressions.)
She hoped he didn't notice the way her steps slowed when she saw him, how she paused and her eyes darted to the nearest escape. But if he noticed anything, he didn't show it. He wiped a look of indifference off of his face, kicking his feet down from where they had rested on the desk in front of him.
He rushed over to her, already reaching for her bags.
"Welcome to Alendal, Leasath's finest city. Can I help you with your bags?" The doorman said, giving her a toothy, forced grin that makes her think he doesn't enjoy his job as much as he should.
Judite tugged down on the hem of her shirt. "That won't be necessary." It came out a little harsh, so she smiled to cover it up, the corners of her lips perking upwards.
The brown-skinned man straightened, hands held behind his back. "Of course. Well, if you need anything, I'm Nicolau." Then, he bent over again, a hand held to his mouth as he spoke, almost like he was telling her a secret, "But, between you and me, you can just call me Nick."
"Thank you…" she said, testing the name out in her mouth, "Nick."
Surprisingly, it felt fine. Natural, even.
"Almost forgot your key," he remarked, winking as he pulled it out of his pocket.
Judite couldn't cover her shock. "How did you—"
"Had it ready for you. You scheduled your arrival. Not that hard."
She takes the key from his hand, careful not to even brush his skin.
"I'm Judite, but call me Judy."
Even then, when she lifted her luggage and carried it to the elevator, whilst Nick called out "second level!" behind her, she secretly hoped that another doorman would be on duty tomorrow.
Years later, separated by an entire hemisphere, an alarm went off. Judy groaned in response, shimmying out of a comfortable nest of sheets atop her bunk, and wriggled in the general direction of the sound to get close enough to disable it. Eventually, she gave up the pretense of trying to continue sleeping altogether, diving at the alarm clock and flailing at the buttons until she hit one that ended the terrible noise.
Silence descended once more, but it was too late. She was awake.
There was a dry chuckle from the bunk below her, rough and masculine.
"So much for enthusiasm, eh Cabernet?" The voice above her head snarked, its owner already sliding off his own bunk to land on his feet with a thud on the barrack floor. "Never thought I'd see the day when Judite friggin' Coelho didn't leap out of the bed in the morning. Thought you were a real go-getter, y'know?"
Judy rubbed blearily at her eyes, and glared at Nick - of course the bastard had landed on his feet, infuriating grin and all. "… you know it's ten in the evening, right?"
"Past your bedtime, I'm guessing?" Nick replied easily, already slipping into a more substantial flight suit over the tank top and shorts - boxers? - that he'd worn to sleep.
"Screw off, Rocket," she muttered in reply, eyes rolling dramatically in their sockets as she slipped out of bed herself. There was a moment where Nick stared at her, making her extraordinarily aware that she was currently clad in her nightgown and nothing much else besides, before yet another smirk emerged on his face - his eyes were only on her hair, thankfully.
"Goddamn, coelhinha, that's one hell of a rat's nest you've got on your head," he said, pointing a finger at her unfortunate case of bed head.
She scowled at him while trying to straighten her hair out, and that was how their morning - or at least, their post-wake-up routine, given that it was currently ten in the bloody evening - began.
(10pm. 8th of June, 2024.)
Their lives had been closely tied together before Judite had gone into the merc business with Nicolau, but now their lives were intertwined in a routine that they each picked up with ease.
There was only one bathroom nearby, and they got ready for action in tandem, ducking underneath each other's arms as they went about brushing their teeth, washing their faces. Judy took her shower afterwards, pushing Nick out of the bathroom with one hand and hanging her towel up on the other, and sooner or later they were in the communal mess-cum-kitchenette.
It wasn't really a true mess hall; the barracks that they currently occupied were never meant to hold the kind of capacity that truly required a mess hall. Here, meals and other forms of refreshment were left to the discretion of the building's occupants - good for GR employees, and for GR-employed mercenaries as well.
Two mugs. Two spoonfuls of instant coffee in Nick's mug, one in hers. Two spoonfuls of sugar in Nick's, none in hers. Pour water. Stir. Top up with milk as needed - a decent amount of it for her, none for Nick. The familiar ritual did as much to wake both of them up as the coffee would, or at least that was what she suspected.
Nick went to hand her a mug, noted her still-closed eyes, and guided it into hands which grasped it reflexively. By the time she had properly gotten a handle on her own mug, Nick had already lifted his own mug to his lips, and he shamelessly slurped at it. Judy rolled her eyes again and took a daintier sip, relaxing as she felt the warmth of the coffee radiate through her. Suddenly, facing the day seemed almost possible.
But then, she made the bad decision to look out the window. Her enthusiasm died in her throat, the fluids from its rotting corpse dripping into her gullet and making her stomach roil with discomfort.
There was nothing outside but a sunless sea. A shining expanse of glassy black in which men died and planes sank with neither sound nor impression, broken only by pale shards of sea ice embedded within and the motes of starlight that dappled its surface, the only things that betrayed the sea for what it truly was - a living creature, slowly moving and shifting under the command of none but itself.
However, another part of her - the part that made her join the Leasathian Air Force in the first place, the part that drove her to defect with Nicolau after Skylla Unit fired cruise missiles at Griswall, the part that was at once the best side of her and the side that terrified her the most since optimism and determination without proper perspective and pragmatic rationalism was far too close to zealotry for comfort - told her to look up.
"Oh, wow…"
She'd only seen pictures of the Aurora Borealis before, but they didn't do justice to how incomprehensibly vast it was. Shimmering green light, forming waves and ripples that shifted and changed with every heartbeat, occupied the firmament above her.
It seemed to loom over the entire base, dwarfing every single building in the area.
There were the barracks where general staff lived (now occupied only by a skeleton crew of maintenance workers as well as an assortment of GR-employed pilots), and the researchers' quarters (forbidden to them under their employment contract; they were under no circumstances allowed to even make contact with the researchers who presumably ran this facility).
Connected to that was a small base HQ that held nothing notable except for a small control tower, along with the hangars at the far side of the base itself (which held, to her knowledge; two Gripens, four Fulcrums, a Globemaster, and a Hawkeye), and even the massive radio dishes in the distance (the most notable part of a terrestrial radio station, meant to send radio signals into space; the base existed solely to support it in such an isolated location).
All of them were dwarfed by this light which seemed to extend past the horizon and into infinity, this inconceivably grand cosmic phenomena overlooking an ocean so unfathomable that it simply left her spellbound in an uneasy sort of nervous excitement—
"What are you looking at?" Nick asked, getting up from the table to look over her shoulder.
Judite blinked. "What do you see?"
Nicolau frowned at that.
"I see my partner, who's still uncaffeinated and currently staring out the window like she's seen a ghost, and not much else. It's dark as shit out here even for me," he groused.
Judy rolled her eyes and reached a hand over to grab her wingman's chin, forcibly wrenching his gaze away from her to peer up at the sky instead.
"Now what do you see?" she asked again.
Nick shook his chin out of her grasp and scowled. "Nothing, Judy, it's-"
Judy sprouted a grin at her partner's sudden silence. Just managing to see him in her peripheral vision, his eyes wide and his jaw lolling open, presumably trying to process what he was seeing, she turned her gaze back towards the sky to admire the sight as well.
"Oh," he eventually cooed.
Judy scooted herself closer to her partner's side, and for his part he stretched his free arm around her to place a hand on her shoulder. They stood like that for a good while, pressed together, staring up at the Northern Lights, Nick in abject fascination, and Judy with a certain quiet familiarity. She found herself finding more amusement sneaking glances at his astonished expression, to be very honest.
After a good while, he drew a sigh and backed away, patting her on the head good-naturedly as he did. "Alright, that was fun, but that still doesn't change the fact that the weather here is dogshit."
Judy considered snarking at him, but was too warm and content to do anything more than answer honestly. "Yeah, anything below zero tends to mix horribly with us. What time is it?"
"About…" Nick mused, checking his watch, "half past ten. And I don't know about you, but I'm starving."
'Breakfast', here at least, involved investigating the possibilities of whatever microwavable meals were still lying around here.
"Huh, looks like the local specialties instead of the usual crappy Kids Cuisine sorta stuff that you see GR giving out. Let's see… Jude, you're okay with me microwaving up some fish?"
"As long as I get the microwave first," Judy muttered, sorting through the stack of meals and pulling out what appeared to be a plastic bowl of microwaveable pea soup. A quick rummage revealed some thankfully clean cutlery that was still lying around, and before long they sat down to their 'breakfast'.
Nick's meal, far from the soft, soggy fish-sticks she had expected, was a long, pink fillet steak covered in a rich, creamy sauce with a side of boiled potatoes. Likewise, far from the smell of factory-made fish sticks like she had expected, or of the smell she had encountered coming off the fish markets in Alendal, the smell was more...
"Salmon?" Judy began incredulously. "Seriously? I didn't even know that they sold it for TV dinners!"
"Yep, boiled salmon with dill sauce and potatoes."
"Poached, not boiled."
"Whatever. Anyways, I remember spending my first actual paycheck as a doorman on something like this… remember the IKEA that was near your place back when you were in college? This isn't exactly the same thing, cause that particular IKEA used some kinda local herb for the sauce instead of dill. Still good, though," he replied, taking a deep whiff of the meal, before picking up his fork and flaking off a large chunk of the fish.
The two of them mostly ate in companionable silence, but that was eventually broken halfway through when Nick's expression drifted off into contemplation. "Sorry I forgot, but what the hell are we being paid to do here besides camp out in this nice heated barrack in the middle of sub-zero weather outside?"
Judy looked up from her pea soup, blinked, and stared at him dumbfoundedly. "How the hell did you forget? We literally landed here and got briefed just this morning."
"What? I tend to forget things when I sleep, and they didn't exactly provide us with a schedule anyways."
"Ugh, fine," she grumbled, running a hand down her face and sticking her spoon in her pea soup - somehow, the soup was thick enough that her spoon ended up sticking straight up. "Here's the thing. You know how every single contract we take is for escort missions?"
"Yep," Nick replied casually, shoving a chunk of salmon into his mouth. "Figured it out after the first year or so, since we pretty much only took bodyguard jobs. It was your idea, if I recall correctly."
"Sure, sure. Anyways, what's essentially happening is that we're here to escort a transport of GR scientists from this rock in the middle of God knows where in Nordennavic to a base in Emmeria where we'll touch down. After that, we get paid and we'll probably go somewhere warmer for the next job."
"Perfect, I think I remember the rest now; a bunch of other mercs are taking off at eleven on the dot… a Fulcrum squadron, I think?"
"Yeah, they fly Fulcrums," Judy said, taking her spoon out of her soup and pointing it vaguely at Nick before shoving it back into her bowl of microwaved pea-derived sludge. "I hear they're Yuktobanians who defected during the Circum-Pacific War, apparently."
Nick snorted, and sipped at his coffee. "Is every sonofabitch who works for GR some kinda defector?"
Judy simply shrugged In response. "Who knows? Anyhow, Hussar Squadron - that's what our Fulcrum-flying colleagues are called - will be taking off at eleven to clear the local airspace for the HVT. At eleven thirty, that's where we come in."
"Ah yeah, escorting a tin can full of eggheads from here till Emmeria," Nicalou snarked. "Sounds hysterical. Like in-flight entertainment."
"Nick, you've never even taken a civilian plane."
"I know! But I've watched movies, alright? I think I know what the inside of an airliner looks like, Miss 'been on vacation to Aurelia a few times'."
Judy… paused for a moment, as Nick grumbled something along the lines of "never could afford the bloody tickets anyways".
Right. She couldn't assume common ground with him, not like this. The both of them had grown up and lived in such markedly different circumstances that they might as well have been from different planets. In situations like these, she found it more convenient - though it grated at her to sidestep a societal problem that could and should have been taken head-on - to focus on their own shared experiences for the sake of harmony.
That was why she was grateful for Nick's presence, sometimes. Immensely so. He reminded her that a world existed beyond her own idealistic imagining of it, no matter how abrasive he was about it sometimes…
"A female fighter pilot?" Nick asked, drawing back in surprise, though Judy could tell by his expression that he was exaggerating his surprise a little. "Well, I've officially seen everything."
Her parents always told her that she had too much nerve growing up, and now she guessed they were right, because without really thinking, she strode right up to the front desk, straightening her cadet uniform. The desk reaches up to her chest and Nick's got his arms crossed over it, leaning down to smile at her in a condescending way that makes the backs of her hands just itch.
"That's right," she said, folding her arms, "and what do you have to say about that?"
"Me? Oh no," he replied easily, holding both hands up, "I'm fairly open minded, coelhinha-"
"Nicknames are not kind, Nicolau-"
"But let me just ask you something: where are you from?"
Judy frowned, not liking the direction that the conversation had taken, but deciding somewhat grudgingly to admit the truth. "The country."
"Ah, just what I expected," he said, leaning back in his chair like he'd proven some great theory. "Though, I have to give it to myself. Totally nailed the wine part."
"What's your point?"
"My point is folks like you come here all the time. Granted, not here as in literally here. I'm surprised you can even afford this place. Anyways, you come here with big dreams and ambitions, but you're gonna be let down, kid. This city will eat you alive, bones and all. Just a warning."
"Yeah?" Judy shoots back. She now had to forcibly try to keep her hands from clenching; a habit she got when she was angry - and now, Nick was making her quite angry. "Well, here's a warning for you: I don't give up easily."
And with that, she made her leave.
"Thank you," she said to the other doorman that opened the door for her, just a little too loudly to appear composed and unaffected.
She could swear, even for years afterwards when far more important things were at hand, that she heard the bastard chuckle behind her.
But the perspective he gave her was useful. Idealism had led her into the LAF; Nick's opposing cynicism had pulled her out of it before she'd lost her soul as well as her innocence to the insidious concept of sunk cost fallacy. There were some days where she'd thought that there truly was no going back from what she had done, escorting the Gleipnir - and thus being complicit in its own atrocities - chief among them, and her partner's constant refrains of 'it's never over unless you are' had been the only thing that kept her on the path of doing what she felt was right instead of what she was merely supposed to do.
And for that, she found herself eternally indebted to him.
Honestly, what tied him to her? What made him follow her into the LAF, and into the Aurelia-Leasath War? Even after they watched the Gliepnir fall at the hands of Gryphus 1 over Santa Elva, even when Leasath itself saw its impending loss and fell into the kind of desperation that led them to fire cruise missiles at Griswall? What made him follow her past all of that, and into the uncharted waters of mercenary life?
Was it friendship, duty, or something else altogether? What motivates a man to follow another person for seven years, through a war that they still had nightmares of, and four of those years flying under no flag but their own?
She wasn't proud to say this, even in the privacy of her own headspace, but she didn't know.
"Jude? Jude!"
Judy startled, almost instantly snapping out of her introspective funk. "Yeah?"
"The Fulcrums are taking off!"
"Yeah why-" she began, before pausing as she glanced outside.
Indeed, there were four MiG-29Gs on the tarmac, visible even through the frost that seemed to cover everything exposed to the outside elements. They could be heard too; the sound of eight RD-33s coming to life, high-pitched banshee shriek deepening and growing in volume into a single unified roar that made her bones shake, even through triple-glazed glass and the barrack's own thick, insulated prefab walls.
The ramifications of what she was seeing then sank in. "Oh crap we're gonna be late!"
"Well we won't be late," Nick snapped, slamming back the rest of his coffee in the next breath, "if we hurry the hell up!"
And so they did.
…
She felt like she was asleep during pre-flight checks. While her body went through the motions, flipping switches and checking flap responses, her mind wasn't in it. It was as if she were lucid dreaming; she could see her hands move, and she could verbally respond to any call-outs given to her, but she didn't register any of those actions. She was watching her body move by itself, stuck on autopilot, a pilot rendered useless in her own cockpit.
When she woke from that dream, she was already in the air.
(11.40am. 8th of June, 2024)
This wasn't new to her, this mechanism of skipping the time between her entering the cockpit of a plane and the moments immediately following takeoff. At first she'd enjoyed flying, enjoyed living a life that she could only imagine before - with the help of video games and documentaries on TV, of course (Warriors and the Belkan War used to be her favourite, at least before her own war). The period between strapping herself into her seat and when she felt the wheels lift off of the ground was often the most agonising, mostly because she had simply been impatient to fly, so spacing out helped alleviate some of that burning excitement.
That changed, during the war with Aurelia. Then, she had been all but dragging herself into the air, her quality of sleep utterly smashed by nightmares involving SWBMs detonating on the horizon, silent flashes of actinic blue light that left afterimages on her retinas - imprints floating in the back of her vision where people once lived. Back then, getting out of her head during pre-flight checks was a way of coping with the rising dread that came with preparing to sortie once again.
Lately, this hasn't happened. As a mercenary, she often spent this time either in casual conversation with her wingman or in equally companionable silence. Either way, she still kept most of her attention on those near-instinctive checks (since she could no longer rely on competent mechanics to find problems on her plane, whilst her mind was in the clouds before her body was).
This was different. This felt numb and empty, like a half-remembered memory that was still a basis for reminiscence. Something there that couldn't quite be reached, no matter how much one tried, though its presence there was all but undeniable.
She didn't want to let it show, but it… unsettled her. The sense that she had lost herself, if only for a moment.
In the absence of the ground to anchor, to use as a landmark, the landscape skipped entirely past being otherworldly in order to enter into the realm of the surreal. An infinite vastness of green luminescence above, and an endless shimmering void below, speckled with glittering false-stars of sea ice reflecting the light from above, separated only by a fine line of nothingness that divided the earth and the heavens.
Compared to sky and sea, what was she? How could she do anything but feel utterly, incomprehensibly small?
She could almost imagine it; that the earth under her was a magnet, pulling on her like iron fillings, keeping her stuck, forcing her down, compressing her tighter and tighter… and the world, the world was so small, just a pebble falling in an endless circle, and she was stuck to it, like those filings to a magnet, but the sunless sea below her was not the floor, it was not the bottom, that was not what was real.
She looked upwards, towards the lights above her head. There, the sky, that was the bottom, that was the floor, that was what she would fall towards forever if the magnet lost its grip, because the sky was the bottom of the universe and they were clinging to that tiny pebble like dew to a blade of grass, like that droplet which clings to a rock pulled from a stream as they fall…
For a brief moment, Judy was not looking up, but looking down, at the hundreds of thousands of stars she could see, at the massive expanse of twinkling diamonds stretching to every corner of the horizon, at the swirling flashes of green superimposed between her and them, almost overwhelming in their vividness - an unending ocean towards which she would fall forever if she did but lose her ever so tenuous grip on the little spinning rock she called home.
The Eruseans had a phrase for it; l'appel du vide, the call of the void. She could almost imagine it, imagine feeling the magnet beneath her lose its pull over her, imagine gently pulling her stick back, her plane arcing to point its nose towards the lights in the sky, past the lights towards the stars among which she would lose herself; imagining the end of imagination, in a sense. The final cessation of being.
She wasn't suicidal - at least, not in the traditional sense. To imply that she was suicidal would be to state that her despair was real and debilitatingly consistent - frankly, if she were truly suicidal, she would have already pulled the trigger on herself during her past three years of mercenary life. To imply that she was suicidal was to imply that she considered suicide an option, that her death would somehow be sufficient penance for what she had wrought. That her death would somehow fix things.
It wouldn't. The dead would still remain dead; her death wouldn't be justice enough.
It was once said that 'those who truly hated have been brought to justice, insomuch as they can be'. That was, of course, a sweeping statement that managed to smooth over the inevitable exceptions.
Because she hadn't been brought to justice, had she?
The only justice that she could give them was this; to continue living, to continue living with the weight of her sins.
Thus weighted down, neither the oceans nor the heavens were hers to lose herself in. Only the earth was here to walk upon or fly above, and only in the skies of the earth could she forget, if only for a few scant moments.
How long had it been since she had cast off her LAF regalia? After Santa Elva? After Griswall? Or in quieter moments, huddled with Nick under a blanket on a too-small sofa in a rented apartment, exchanging old regrets and baring their own scars (or in some cases, open wounds that still festered) under the lubricating influence of a bottle of cheap red wine?
As much as her past self would have loathed to admit, Nicolau was her other half. He had been there at her highest highs, when she had first joined the LAF and the sky was quite literally the limit. He had stayed and stuck through her lowest lows, when she couldn't even look at fireworks displays without huddling into a ball and sobbing into her arms, when the nausea rippled through her in waves and she couldn't even bear the sight of bright flashes of blue in the night sky without vomiting.
Through all of that, he had been there. He hadn't left. Given his track record for cutting his losses and running as soon as things started going to shit (she wasn't as naïve as Nick liked to think she was; she knew what it meant for somebody to abandon the favela cartels, and knew that he was likely more adrift than even her - she had a home that would welcome her if she ever wanted to return, but that wouldn't happen for a long time and possibly never would. Nick didn't even have that.), it was frankly astounding that he hadn't left her behind too.
It wasn't as if he hadn't noticed, not after their time together in the LAF. Especially not that time with the fireworks where she'd nearly gone into hysterics after the blue ones had lit up the sky. For some reason, he had seen how much of a mess she was, and had decided to stay and stick it out with her regardless.
As much as she didn't want to admit it, that was why she had fallen for him. That was why she loved him. To be fully seen by somebody and be loved regardless was an offering that bordered on miraculous for anybody, much less somebody like her. Even if it was just platonic, even if he didn't reciprocate her affections and never would, his continued companionship and presence by her side was still something that drove her onwards every day.
She doubted he even knew that.
There was a soft rustle from her flight suit as she subtly shifted in her seat, reaching forwards to flick on her radio, but even that seemed deafening in the tranquil silence that surrounded her.
(Perhaps that should have been the first hint; they were travelling at subsonic speeds, yet the normally omnipresent ambient noise from her Gripen's single engine was all too inconspicuously absent).
The mute button made a soft click under her thumb as she depressed it, and then she spoke.
"Nick- Rocket… I…"
The words seemed caught in the back of her throat. What had she even wanted to say? She'd forgotten.
Luckily, her partner and wingman was more than happy to fill the silence.
"You're breaking radio silence for little old me, Cabernet? How flattering," he said easily, his voice carrying that lightly teasing lilt that drew her to him in the first place.
There was a pause, one they shared in companionable silence. A few moments in level flight, moments where there was nothing but the two of them in the skies they shared.
"It's the scenery, isn't it?" Nick - Rocket now, since they were working - asked. His question was somewhat rhetorical, but Judy let that pass for now. "It makes you think. Sometimes, of things that you normally don't think about."
"Yeah, I was thinking-"
"And do you know what I'm thinking?" A new voice suddenly asked. "I'm thinking that you two are breaking radio silence! So, please."
Judy blushed, and sank slightly lower into her seat. "Sorry, Herald."
"I was about to lift radio silence anyways, so it's fine," the AWACS responded kindly, "but next time, please leave the heartfelt conversations on the ground. I don't want to overhear stuff I really shouldn't be hearing, not like last time."
"… last time?" Nick asked hesitantly.
They hadn't flown with this particular AWACS before, but so far this soft-spoken GR-employed guy sounded decent enough over the radio. Decent, complete with a stiff North Pointer upper lip, but albeit almost worryingly candid - like now.
"Yes, during my last job. Anyways, Phase 1 of the operation is complete and radio silence is lifted. Local airspace is secure," Herald continued, his tone rapidly switching into one that sounded more businesslike than anything else. "Anhangá Team, rendezvous with and form up with Librarian 1. Hussar Squadron, pull back and form up about fifty clicks in front of Anhangá - you guys are our vanguard. Hussar 1, Anhangá 1, please acknowledge."
"Anhangá 1, acknowledged," Judy replied, almost immediately afterwards taking her finger off of the mute button. A second later, she was gently pulling on the stick, directing the plane to the required vector in order to meet up with their escortee.
As expected, Rocket's plane was only a step behind her.
"Hussar 1, please acknowledge," Herald said again.
There was another pause. This time, instead of comfortable companionship, this moment of silence was intensely apprehensive.
"Hussar 1, please acknowledge immediately," Herald repeated, dread creeping into his tone. "Hussar 1? Hussar 1!"
Nothing.
Then, everything at once.
"Ah, shit! Anhangá, get to Librarian 1, full burners!"
"What's our bearing to the principal?" Rocket asked - his voice was outwardly as even and composed as it always was, but there was a note of panic in his tone that only somebody as close to him as Judy would be able to notice. "And what's their altitude?"
Honestly, she couldn't blame him. The aurora over their heads, as pretty as it was, had essentially killed any possibility of visual contact unless their presumed bogey was dangerously close. With the disappearance of an entire four-man team of Fulcrums, which had apparently happened so suddenly and rapidly that they didn't even have time to use their radios, the situation was rapidly approaching something out of a horror movie.
"Bearing zero-one-zero, angels forty. At your current speed, you'll intercept Librarian 1 in thirty seconds tops."
Judy's hand reached for the throttle, pushed it forwards as far as it would go. A full-bodied shudder rippled through her Gripen, but she didn't (couldn't) hear the corresponding roar from her engine's afterburner. Or Rocket's. Or anything outside her own cockpit, really.
It was… disquieting. The background noise that accompanied flying a fighter jet, from the way that an engine's voice deepened from a whistling whine to a lion's growling roar as the afterburners kicked on, was something that she had experienced ever since she had stepped into a jet's cockpit.
Imagine it this way; you have a pet dog. Or a cat, if that is what you prefer. Sometimes, the dog barks. The cat meows, or perhaps even screams. The noise, while almost intolerable from an objective third-party viewpoint, is something that you have grown to tolerate if not actually like. Of course, you don't actually like the noise itself - you like it because it is associated with your dog, or your cat. The noise is part and parcel of something that is close to your heart, and that is why you love it.
One day, that noise is gone. No barking. No meowing or screaming. Nothing.
The lack of engine noise evoked a similar feeling in her heart. The noises that she had lived with almost every day for going on five years were completely and utterly gone; it was as if the very world, dark save for the unearthly green aurora above her head, was swallowing up any and all sound outside of her little polyurethane bubble.
And it frankly terrified her.
"We have visuals on Librarian 1," she eventually said into the radio, as the looming shape of the C-17 gradually began to become distinct from the night sky. "Moving into escort position."
Its engines were also completely failing to make any sort of sound, even when Anhangá's two Gripens began to form up at the flanks of the transport. Perhaps that should have been a warning for what came next.
They never finished forming up with the Globemaster.
"Why now of all times?" Herald muttered, the frantic clacking of keys clearly audible through the radio. "I swear, this bloody thing has been getting false readings ever since they recalibrated the radar a few weeks ago."
"What do you mean, false readings?" Judy asked cautiously.
"I dunno, just now something popped up on radar. It makes no sense, though; it was literally right above you guys, but at maximum observable altitude… wait."
"What?" Rocket snapped.
"Holy fucking shit, something's coming right down on you both, and it's coming fast- look up look up!"
They looked up.
Something streaked down from the stars. Still shedding a white-hot corona of heat from atmospheric entry, it came down a good distance in front of the ad-hoc formation before levelling out - its velocity hadn't changed one single bit, and it was travelling far too fast for human eyes to observe properly.
And it was coming for them.
"What the fuck is that?" Rocket exclaimed.
"Tally-ho, one unknown bogey! It's on a collision course with us-" Judy gasped. "Break- break!"
It flashed between them, but Judy had glimpsed how it had subtly turned to orient itself; she had seen how, if only for a moment, the edge of its wing glinted in the light of the aurora like a wicked blade. It was only a glimpse, though - perhaps it was just her imagination.
Less than a second later, the C-17 Globemaster III they had been escorting fell away behind them in two halves, neatly split down the middle with nary a sound.
And all the rest was silence.
(It was not her imagination.)
"… I- I- what?" Rocket muttered incredulously.
"… we lost Librarian 1," Judy found herself saying. The words hadn't even crossed her mind, and yet they came regardless. An automatically generated statement, unfortunately unable to convey the complete and utter shock of the moment.
"… what?" Herald. "What the fuck just happened?"
"… we lost the objective. The unknown bogey got past Rocket and I, and literally split Librarian 1 in half."
"You're kidding, right? You have to be," Herald responded weakly. "Please. Please don't tell me we didn't just lose our objective. Jesus fuck, it's probably the same thing that wiped out our vanguard too."
There hadn't even been anything over the radio. One moment, the transport had been there - the people within had been alive. The next, it had been sundered by something that had simply come down from the stars, scattering its passengers over the shining glass of the sea where planes sank and men died without sound or impression.
A light clack of plastic on plastic echoed through the radio, which was promptly followed by a burst of static. Herald, switching his radio channel to wide-band broadcast.
"Hailing unidentified aircraft! You have attacked a legitimate, lawful General Resource operation. State your country or organisation of origin and disengage immediately, or you will be fired upon."
The unidentified aircraft swung around again, pulling level slightly above and off to the side of the Gripen formation.
"What the fuck is that?"
"This is Anhangá 1, I've got eyes on the bogey," Judy stated evenly - however, not evenly enough to hide how her voice subtly shook. "Craft is long and thin, almost tapered. Roughly twenty meters long, twelve in wingspan. No cockpit or tail to be seen - it's just a fuselage and wings, as far as I can tell. You see what I'm seeing, Herald?"
"Christ, the damn thing's a UFO. Tagging as UNKNOWN on your IFFs, it should be showing up on your HUDs now-"
Rocket started to freak out. "UFO's breaking! And it seems to be… charging up something?"
"I'm reading a massive spike in EM signature from the UFO, what the fuck is it doing?"
"It's-" Judy began, before even she was lost for words.
There were… three vast concentric rings around the unidentified aircraft, made of some sort of energy that glowed with malevolent turquoise light. They spread like a divine halo around the UFO's midsection, forming two distinct bands filled with… symbols. Sigils of a language that she could neither read nor understand, but just looking at them made the space behind her eyes itch.
Then the rings began to spin, adopting a contra-rotationary pattern as the inner band went clockwise whist the outer one went counterclockwise, and that turquoise light that made her lizard brain wail and scream within the bounds of her skull somehow managed to become even more terrible than it was before - it brightened.
As for the UFO itself, it moved with a speed that could only be described as otherworldly. Rolling away from them, it suddenly pivoted - as if its wings were pinjoints, affixing it to the firmament as surely as a door was to its frame - and turned its nose downwards within the span of a few heartbeats. In the same movement, the utter violation of anything resembling aerodynamic sense regarding the UFO's angle of attack was also accompanied by its projected alien array growing yet brighter…
"Herald," Judy began, dread starting to creep down her spine with its icy fingers. "Herald? What's your bearing and attitude relative to us?"
"Relative to you, I'm at bearing two-one-zero, angels thirty. Why?"
Her breath hitched in horrified realisation.
"Herald, it's going after you! Evade!"
She was too late.
The alien array around the UFO flared once, before a pillar of turquoise energy lanced out from its centre. A line, breaking the clouds apart and scattering them along its path, connecting the extraterrestrial plane to its target for a heart-stopping moment, so overwhelmingly bright that all the other colours of the world bled out, faded merely by comparison to the majesty of this… of this weapon.
Then, before she could even begin to comprehend what she was seeing, it was over. The light, the array, all of it was gone. Gone, save for a faint orange glow somewhere beneath them and the unending static where a friendly AWACS had been.
Gone, just like that.
The panic, the all-consuming fear of the unknown, roiled in the pit of her stomach, threatened to surge out through her oesophagus and escape her maw in the form of an animalistic scream.
Fear is embedded in humanity's collective memory. It's why humans covet light, why they recoil from snakes before they've even realised what they've seen. It's why the edges of old maps were shrouded in fog, with the words 'Here Be Monsters' the only warning necessary. It's why they looked up into the skies, at the sun, the moon, and the stars, and turned them into their gods.
Here was something from that fog, something that had come down from the skies, something that looked straight through the courage of a fighter jet's cockpit, looked through the flesh and bones and into the bloody echoes of humanity's memories.
Here is what you knew was lurking, there beyond the stars.
Here is your death.
Here be monsters.
Judy stared at the monster, the one that had cut a transport plane in half and utterly obliterated a four-man team of Fulcrums as well as the AWACS overseeing the entire operation, and made her decision.
She took a deep breath. Dread pooled in her stomach from the very thought of it, forming an oily ball of icy adrenaline, but it had to be done.
"Do you trust me, Nick?"
"Of course," he replied immediately. Promptly, unquestioningly. As if trusting her was the most natural thing to do in the world.
That only made it hurt more.
"I'm going to hold the UFO off. While I'm doing that, I want you to leave the AO as fast as possible. You understand me?"
"Wait what- Judy!"
The fear and desperation in his voice was more than enough to tear her eyes from the UFO hunting them. He sounded completely and utterly terrified, as if the thought of losing her was more scary than the literal alien hunting them, and that somehow hurt her more than anything else she could imagine.
But this was something she had to do. This was a decision with just as much conviction behind it as the moment when she had decided to desert the LAF over Griswall.
If she had to die so that her partner could live, so be it.
"I'll…" she began, before pausing. Lying didn't come naturally to her, at least when she was lying to other people. She was a much better liar to herself, after all. "I'll see you on the other side, Nick."
Judy pushed her stick to the right and pulled the stick back, the resulting g-forces pushing her insides back against each other (fit to match the way everything inside her was roiling, a seething cauldron of emotions that was gradually beginning to settle into something cold and numb) as she peeled off from their element.
When she heard her partner's choked sob over the radio, her heart fell.
"Please… promise you'll come back to me, please. I can't lose you too…"
"I will, slick," she lied. "I will."
Cabernet reached up to her console, and flicked the switch that would turn her radio off.
Push the throttle forwards, bringing it up from eighty percent to full burners. Jettison the drop tank from the centreline hardpoint. Account for the tools available; two Sidewinders, four AMRAAMs, and a hundred and twenty rounds for the 27mm cannon housed on the bottom left of the Gripen's nose.
It would have to be enough.
There was nothing else in the local airspace. Any friendlies worth mentioning were already high-tailing it out of the AO, and the only aircraft ahead of her was the UFO. Another moment of fiddling with the console, and her HUD bore a luminescent circle of dotted lines. At the bottom, VISUAL in block letters.
"Fox 3," she said, out of habit than for any practical reason - after all, her radio was off. There was nobody left to hear her brevity callouts.
The AMRAAM left its hardpoint a moment later, arching upwards along with her Gripen's nose as she pulled the stick back to aid it along its parabolic trajectory. The missile's white contrail plumed outwards in its wake, drawing a line through the starless, aurora-lit night. With it being in visual mode, the familiar trill of a radar lock was absent. The similarly familiar fwoosh of the radar-guided missile zipping off from her wing was also lost, swallowed up with the rest of the sounds outside her cockpit that she could no longer hear.
The missile flew in an arc, rising slightly before dipping and drawing level with its target. She'd put the nose on target, roughly; all the better to minimise the chances of evasion. Would an UFO have chaff, or flares for that matter?
It did not. The AMRAAM made impact, its proximity fuse detonating as it would for any human aircraft. Metal shrapnel scattered, reflecting the turquoise light of the UFO's own weapons array as they tore into its skin–
–its skin, which parted to reveal a glittering inner layer that wasn't so much torn as it was smashed by the shrapnel. It was as if the steel fragments had punched through a ceramic dinner plate, leaving behind distinct holes surrounded by a corona of broken shards.
Then she heard the first sound that had come from outside her cockpit in far too long.
It was a scream. Its scream was high and desperate; a young woman's scream, birthed in a throat framed by far too many teeth. It was a scream without sound, and it made Judy's brain shiver in her skull. The sound played at her eardrums, ringing with such a high pitch that it occasionally flickered into the realm of ultrasound. A premonition, maybe, or a phantom of memory from a long-distant time caused the hairs on her neck to prickle.
It sounded… vaguely familiar, perhaps even recognisable if she really sat down and thought about it, but she didn't have the time to consider it. Not with how its wounds bled.
The alien bled. From the rents in its shell, burgundy streamed out in pluming trails that dissipated in its wake. The burgundy lingered nigh-indelibly in her memory like something out of her worst nightmares of the Gleipnir and its LSWMs; it clung to her retinas as if she'd been staring at the sun for too long. The more she stared at it, the more unnerved she got - the more she looked, the more she knew that she would never be able to forget this moment, even if she wanted to. The burgundy had burned itself into her memory, just as the actinic blue of meson detonations had.
As the UFO and its deadly array turned to face in her direction, Judy broke hard again. She breathed in as the g-forces kicked her in the gut, and reached over to flick the toggle switch placed conveniently near to the throttle.
(An Angle-of-Attack delimiter. Normally reserved for the supermaneuverable planes of legitimate militaries, such as the Flankers and Felons used by Yuktobania and Erusea, as well as Osean Raptors and Agile Eagles, her ever-so-resourceful partner had somehow… 'come into possession' of two examples, seemingly plucked directly from the Macmillan Heavy Industries production lines.
He'd insisted that they had to be installed in their planes before the two of them took this mission. Luckily, GR had been willing to install them at no extra cost, but she distinctly recalled arguing with Nick about the unnecessary time and resources involved.
Now, she'd probably never get the chance to thank him.)
The transition was seamless enough, with her Gripen's fly-by-wire controls disengaging with nothing but a short jolt of mild protest. The hard turn she had already thrown her plane into tightened into something even harder, shrinking her turning circle significantly while causing her to rapidly bleed airspeed. Her plane carved down and around the UFO, mercifully bringing her out of the array's sights before it fired.
It was only then, when she had fully evaded the alien array's next shot, that she realised her mistake.
She had assumed the UFO would go after her, since she had hurt it.
She had also overlooked the fact that she had essentially asked Nick to run… from a weapon that had only recently shot down a Hawkeye from kilometres away.
He never stood a chance.
The air bled in the beam's wake, the firmament cut open by a divine lance - a weapon that was never intended for her.
A fireball blossomed in the distance, a blooming flower of orange flame and black smoke - fiery petals, wilting into darkened ash within mere moments. Ephemeral as the Sotoan cherry blossom, the tree that blooms for a week and remains barren for the rest of the year. Beautiful, and fleeting as any soldier's life was.
Nick.
The final and only testament to the existence of a man she'd called best friend and partner… and maybe, in some treacherous part of her heart, he was hers.
Now, she could never tell him.
Because he was gone.
The oily ball of adrenaline in her gut solidified into jagged ice and broke into a million shards, ripping into her gut and stabbing into her heart. Then, the coldness spread, casting a shell over her entire insides that completely and utterly numbed her. There were no words left, no tears to be shed, no sobs to escape her trembling throat.
There was only the complete and utter certainty that she would die here.
(Nick had followed her for as long as she'd known him; he'd followed her into the LAF, he'd followed her when she deserted the LAF and went into the mercenary life, and he had even followed her to this - an ignominious death over a sunless sea.
She owed it to him to do likewise, even if it was only once. Even if it was the last thing she did.
Especially if it was the last thing she did.)
She pulled her plane into another turn that would normally have been almost unbearably uncomfortable, but her insides were cast of iron now. Nothing of this earth could reach her, and now nobody born of this earth could as well. Her heart seemed as if it were trying to beat itself out of her ribcage, everything seemed too hyperactive and hypersensitive even while she could feel practically nothing at all.
At least her fingers still worked. Her hands didn't even shake, as she switched over to the heatseekers. The sound of a wingtip Sidewinder's growl, undeniably electronic yet almost akin to that of a feral animal in this moment, expressed what she physically could not.
In this moment, she was rabid.
"Fox 2!" Judy snarled, her words curled as if they were venomous. Her Gripen pulled into a head-on joust with the UFO, helped along by the AoA delimiter, and there was a violently warm flash of vindictive glee as she watched the AIM-9X zip off of its wingtip rail and orient itself perfectly to slam into the UFO's nose–
–but she never had the chance to see the damage it caused, because the decision to joust the UFO had proven to be her last.
Mortal men could never engage something from beyond the stars on equal terms. If the cosmos was divine, this was one of their angels - distant, unknowable and yet undeniably cruel.
When it came time for them to pass each other, the UFO emerged from the cloud of black smoke that the Sidewinder's impact had caused. It rolled ever so slightly so that its left wing (a wing that gleamed in the night like a sharp blade because its wings were blades, refined to a singularly monomolecular edge) caught into the seam between the Gripen's nose and its canopy.
(It cut her in half at the shoulder.)
All she saw was light.
…
Judy opened her eyes.
And then kept them open, while she looked around herself in utter confusion.
She had apparently awoken in a wine cellar. Not just any wine cellar, but the wine cellar - the one she had practically grown up in.
It was… a roughly cavernous space, dug deep into the plateau where the Coelho family estate had been built. The walls were bricks of basalt, hewn somewhat unevenly and bound together by mortar - the estate had been built hundreds of years ago, when Sapinish settlers had come to occupy the land that would eventually be known as Leasath. Though the original buildings of the Coelho vineyard had long since been demolished and refurbished over the centuries, the old cellar had always been enough to accommodate the needs of generations of Coelhos.
The timbers that crowned this place, while not quite as old, were equally venerable; her grandfather's grandfather had laid down the dark crossbars that spanned over her head now, keeping a ceiling made of wooden decking aloft. The floor, too, was made of the same wood as the ceiling - it was a wood with many names. Some called it lapacho, whilst others called it ipe, but she was content to refer to it simply as Leasathian walnut.
The air was cool and dry, all the better for the wine fermenting within the barrels that this place contained.
She happened to be seated in a leather armchair - one that was familiar and welcoming. It was the one in the wine tasting room, set amidst the hundreds of glass bottles placed in wooden niches along the cobblestone walls. The tasting room was traditionally somewhat isolated from where the main cellar was, and as such it was a good way away from the hundreds of oaken barrels that held the various varieties of fermented grape juice upon which the Coelho family made their fortune.
However, there was an unwelcome presence here. Not quite unfamiliar of course, given how the newcomer sat beside her in the other armchair in the room. They were separated by a single side table carved from the same wood that formed the ceiling of this room, but the armchairs were angled companionably towards each other so that their occupants could converse. On the side table between them was a bottle of wine, already opened. One glass had already been poured out for Judy, while the other presence sipped daintily at her own.
The other presence in the room wasn't unfamiliar at all… because she was her. Judy sat in the armchair to the right, watching the Judy in the left chair sip her wine.
The chairs were angled towards a fireplace, which had already been stocked with logs and was now burning merrily. Placed in front of the fireplace was a stretched-out rug made from the skin of a jaguar.
(Judy remembered that particular story; in her grandfather's day, the jaguar before her had attacked some of the vineyard's workers, even killing some of them. As was customary for the patriarch of a rich country family in the 1930s, her great-grandfather had responded to the challenge by taking up his hunting rifle - the skin stretched out before the fire now was testament to how successful that particular hunt had been.)
Cast in the light of the fireplace, the difference between the two of them was obvious; the Judy in the left chair was blind. A strip of cloth was wrapped around her face, covering her eyes, but yet she stared sightlessly at the blazing fire.
"You were never supposed to be here," her blindfolded doppelgänger eventually said. She sipped at her wine again, and grimaced slightly at the taste. "Too bitter for me, sadly, but I suppose my palate has been spoiled somewhat."
Judy herself scoffed, and poured out her own glass of wine. She sniffed at it slightly, the familiar bouquet calming her nerves, before she raised the lip of her glass to her mouth in order to taste the vintage for herself.
The wine was dry and full-bodied, with acidity that was palpable but not overwhelming. The predominant flavours were of blackcurrant, but there were also notes of green bell pepper, mint, cedar and even vanilla. Some of them were from the grapes themselves, but others were from the fact that this particular wine had been tastefully in oak barrels for about… roughly three years, if her palate and gut instinct was correct.
All in all, a classic example of a Leasathian Cabernet Sauvignon.
Judy brought the glass away from her mouth, placing it back on the side table, before she smacked her lips thoughtfully. "Your palate has been spoiled, this isn't a bad wine at all."
"I thought you would appreciate it, given the fact that you were named for it," her blind twin responded, still staring without sight at the fire. "Your callsign… 'Cabernet'. They called you that at the academy?"
Despite the roiling feelings in her gut, Judy still found a fond smile curling the edges of her mouth upwards from the recollection. "It was our graduation ceremony, you see, and most of us were already buzzed to shit. God knows how Rocket of all people was the one who managed to stay mostly sober, but it was… midway during the celebration?"
"Right."
"Yeah. And then one of our classmates… what was his name again, Emanuel? Anyways, this guy walks in with a bottle of wine - one of my bottles of wine - and starts complaining about how expensive it was. And because I was already drunk as shit then, I started…"
"Rambling about the wine?"
"Yeap. I must have said something about how my family was the one who made that particular wine, because I woke up the next day to find myself the subject of a callsign naming ceremony. That was how I became 'Cabernet', per se."
The blindfolded version of her chuckles, an oddly bitter sound that didn't quite sit well with Judy herself, before raising her own glass in not-quite-sincere congratulations. "I.. can never imagine something like that. I never actually got a callsign, after all."
There was a pause.
Judy turned to look at her blind counterpart. She was smiling at the fire, but it was a sad smile - resigned, and so tired that it was almost painful to watch. She herself knew how it felt; she had smiled like that during the war, after all.
"Aren't we the same?" Judy (the original) eventually asked.
"Perhaps, barring some minor yet fundamental differences," the other one said. "They called me 'Jormungandr' back then, but I prefer to go by Gandr."
Gandr. She mulled the name over in her head a bit, before she progressed to rolling it over her tongue. Gandr… hardly a name for a person, but it would have to do.
"Gandr, then," Judy said herself, before picking up her wine glass again. She tilted it towards Gandr, an unspoken gesture of directing her next words towards her companion. "And what do you mean, differences?"
Gandr froze. She sat there and simply… breathed for a moment, one hand clamped around the stem of her wineglass as if trying to snap it around her fingers, the other tightly gripping the armrest of her own chair. It was as if she was carefully considering her next words, really.
"I… never really met Nicolau, for one. If I ever did meet him, he wasn't more than 'Rocket' to me. Nothing as significant as how he was for you, unfortunately."
The mention of Nick instantly killed any easy reply that was already on her tongue. The wine she had sipped earlier turned cloyingly sweet, clinging to her throat in a manner that was more suffocating than anything else. She couldn't breathe, not when the pain was so harsh and recent…
Gandr, the her-that-was-not-her, turned towards her and smiled sympathetically. It was clearly a completely genuine gesture, but there was still something about the smile that was not quite right - like how the expression itself sent shivers down her spine.
Then, she sighed heavily.
"… I know you cared for him deeply. On some level, you still care for him. The loss you feel right now must be… truly unbearable. For what it is worth, I am sorry for…"
Gandr took a deep breath.
"I am sorry for killing him."
Judy blinked. She turned to Gandr, mouth already agape in utter surprise, the contrasting twins of terror and grief-fuelled anger coiling in her gut like a pair of serpents waiting to be unleashed…
… and then the tasting room of her family vineyard vanished, and she knew nothing at all.
…
Judite Coelho woke up with a scream on her lips.
The sheets were suffocating her; she was drowning in them as surely as if she was being dragged into her death by the undercurrents of a river. She shook them off with all the vigour of a rabbit trying to escape a predator's grip - the blankets crumpled to the floor in a sad little heap, already drenched in sweat.
Had it all been one giant nightmare?
She glanced at the alarm clock next to her bed, which conveniently hadn't rung yet. Evidently her… nightmare has woken her up earlier than expected, given that it was a whole twenty minutes before the time at which the alarm was supposed to ring.
(9.40pm. 8th of June, 2024.)
Above her, there was the painfully familiar noise of someone snoring.
Judy almost didn't want to look, but she had to. She was compelled to, almost as if something within her was pushing her to do it.
Slowly, carefully, she crept out of her own bunk and dropped silently to the floor. Then, she looked up at the bunk above her own.
It took a moment, a single heart-stopping moment, for her to comprehend what she was seeing.
Nicolau Saramago. Rocket. Nick. Alive.
Her body moved by itself, and she surged upwards, practically diving past the bunk's ladder to wrap her partner and best friend in a snuggling embrace.
Nick outright yelped in surprise, jolted awake by the sudden impact, but soon realised the situation at hand. It took a bit of fidgeting, but he melted into the embrace soon enough.
Neither of them were exactly decent, per se; Nick was only wearing a tank top and something she was now sure was just his boxers, and she herself was clad in a nightgown. But currently she didn't care; now, she wanted nothing but to drink in his presence.
Nightmares couldn't be forgotten. They could only be exposed to the warming light of day, where they would then fade away into the ether of lost memory.
She honestly wished that she could stay this forever; wrapped around her partner just as he was now wrapped around her, revelling in the closeness of two hearts that yet still beat.
(She should have wished harder.)