Chapter 17: 17 Edge Cases, Part Two

1.5 months before impact

By the time Tsuyoshi got there he already regretted booking tickets just because they were cheap and he wanted a month away from his ex. New Invania was boring. And why that name? It's not like there was an old Invania as far as he was aware. After a century was the country supposed to change its name to Moderately Well Established Invania?

Everyone in the tour group was tedious, wanting nothing but beer and hook ups. And the tour leader kept pointing out the newness of the buildings, as if that was what anyone went to Europe for.

By the time the tour led them to a shiny new bar, wood panelling and coloured lights clashing everywhere he looked, Tsuyoshi had managed to alienate everyone else on the shitty tour enough with his attitude that they let him sit at the bar to drink paint stripper level vodka in peace. As planned.

That didn't stop strangers from trying to talk to him. Like the ever so friendly bartender who assumed tourists like conversation, or the fake-tanned redhead in a hot pink bikini who thought that was a reasonable outfit to wear into a place with unvarnished wood seats and didn't have any gaydar.

Or the tall guy, looking positively cro magnon in ugly camo, that kept looking over at him.

Admittedly, pretty hot, and maybe Tsuyoshi only noticed because he kept looking over, too. He spilled vodka on his fingers while he looked and he was pretty sure the caveman was looked at his mouth while he licked them clean. Of course he did. Tsuyoshi tried not to shift in his seat.

Didn't mean he wanted to be disturbed when he could wallow in peace, so of course the guy came over, started trying to talk.

"Is it safe for someone like you to hang around in shady bars like this without anyone watching you?" the caveman asked.

What a douche bag. "What's it to you?"

"This is a politically unstable area. You shouldn't be alone."

Wow, it wasn't even subtle. Tsuyoshi rolled his eyes and licked up more of his vodka.

The stranger ignored the signal and kept talking. "I'm part of NACEMC. It's like the spiritual successor to NATO." He pulled at the sleeve of his uniform like drawing attention to it would impress anyone.

Tsuyoshi rolled the garnish to his drink around in his mouth. "How can it be the successor to NATO when NATO still exists?"

"Now I see why you're drinking alone."

"I'm not going to fuck you," Tsuyoshi said.

"Don't be so up yourself. I just wanted a pity chat with the only person here who sat by himself. I would never be interested."

Tsuyoshi laughed. "I'm really really not going to fuck you if you try to neg me."

He was pretty sure the guy yelled, "I could do better," as Tsuyoshi walked out of the bar, but he didn't pay that much attention. Could just have as easily been someone yelling at a girl.

*

There were insects in the hostel, crawling everywhere like his own personal nightmare, which is why Tsuyoshi had taken his stuff with him and gone walking to try find a better place on the night of the explosion. His personal luck that a disinterest in being food for locusts meant he avoided death.

Things got difficult after that, with his tour group gone. He couldn't hitch a ride out because the roads were blocked, but nobody noticed him walking through a field at night until he hit a dirt road that led to the next town.

If the news hadn't been censored getting out of Invania he might have known that the fighting had already been happening there intermittently for months. Further on the buildings were pockmarked and scorched. Papers everywhere that people stepped around. He met a guy in a hotel bar that first night who was impressed enough by his knowledge of the history of punk music to give him a place to sleep, and woke in the morning in a strange house as clueless about his options as the night before.

Went west a few days but that was a bust, everything getting more shabby as he walked until the smell of something burning in the distance made him turn around.

East until he was sure he'd walked as far as should get him back to the capital city. Only, it didn't quite seem to exist any more.

Wasn't sure how it had all gone to shit so fast.

*

He picked through the remains of what he was pretty sure had been the hostel he'd stayed in. What a mess. It was only his luck that meant he moved five steps away from the front of the building before the pillar holding up the remaining porch collapsed.

For a moment he thought he saw a corpse waving at him from where it was pinned, eyes glassy and still, between two chunks of luridly painted concrete, but he blinked and it was still again.

"I have nothing to offer you," he whispered into the dusty air. "Set your own soul free."

The distraction was the only reason the other person got so close. The sound of footsteps, at the last moment, making him turn to face the local sneaking up on him. Ashy skin, wiry hair. The stranger grabbed at Tsuyoshi's bag, an opportunist, but Tsuyoshi swung away from him quick enough to avoid the sharp glint of a knife. The stranger swung again, knife hand already bloody. Tsuyoshi stumbled, grabbing at his surroundings for something of his own to swing. Only a small chunk of the crumbled masonry came off in his hands but it was something to throw.

The stranger yelled something he didn't understand then grabbed his own shoulder and dropped the knife.

Tsuyoshi tried to run faster through the ruin of the building but the wooden floor beneath his boots was a splintered mess. And the bodies left in the mess kept looking at him like they expected something from him.

Had the stranger picked up the knife again? Fuck, fuck, he didn't want to get stabbed and bleed out on the broken floor of some shitty hostel in the middle of nowhere.

Footsteps and loud breathing crept up behind him again and he grabbed a plank of wood and swung. Missed, but the stranger missed him, too. Tsuyoshi didn't miss again. The wood made a heavy sound when it connected with the stranger's arm. Again when it hit a fleshier part of the stranger's body. Tsuyoshi kept hitting until the screeching stopped.

The stranger was still moving on the ground as he stepped back. He dropped the wood and felt the burning in his palms where the splinters dug in. His hands were shaking, sweaty. His arms turning to liquid from the elbows down.

Another set of footsteps, heavy boots clunking their way toward him, and his eyes swung around, wild, trying to see where a body might be moving.

The cro magnon from the bar entered upon the scene, one hand heavy with a shotgun.

Tsuyoshi stared, unable to make his legs move. The stranger on the floor made a moaning noise. The man with a gun shot the stranger's brains all over the floor.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said, and holstered his gun.

The shaking had spread from Tsuyoshi's hands to his shoulders. "Oh, fuck, we killed a guy."

"You'd already beat him 90% dead. I just stopped the noise."

"I've never done this before. I don't really know post-murder etiquette."

"It's not murder if it's self defence. Or in war." The man's hands were gentle on his as he picked the splinters out. "I'm Zelko. We met in a bar. You can trust me."

He felt the rest of his body turning liquid hot at that touch. "I've changed my mind. You can definitely fuck me."

A significant pause while Tsuyoshi waited to see whether that would get him killed after all and then Zelko grabbed his face and kissed his mouth open, hot and wet. Tsuyoshi grabbed at that body, pulled as Zelko pushed, and found himself back flat against a wall. Zelko's physical presence was big and strong and overwhelming, blocking out everything else in the world.

All he could hear was their breathing, the sound of a belt buckle, the rushing in his ears.

"Please," he said, and then Zelko's hands were pushing his jeans down.

He shoved one boot off, ungainly, so his jeans wouldn't get caught on his feet.  The world went still.

Afterwards, when they'd slumped down and rearranged their clothes just enough they wouldn't be putting bare skin on filthy, splintering floors, Tsuyoshi looked at the mess around him, the dead bodies and shattered concrete, and said, "Politically unstable, huh?"

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"I thought Russia would invade, not internal collapse."

"They still could. It's probably easier now."

"What's your name? I don't like not knowing your name after that," Zelko said.

Zelko looked kind of shy now that all the adrenaline had worked its way out. Tsuyoshi swallowed air and answered.

"I've never done this with a man before," Zelko said.

Tsuyoshi was pretty sure he wasn't talking about the killing.

"Well, I've never done it with a white guy before. We're all learning something new."

Zelko touched his hands again, gentle. "I want to find a way out of this hell-hole. Will you come with me?"

As if the answer was ever going to be no.

*

But first of all, Zelko had to find everyone he came with. "They went North, I think. Or maybe South."

"How did you lose all your soldier friends?"

"I got turned around looking for something and got lost. What can you do?"

Only when Tsuyoshi suggested Zelko just phone them did he realise his own phone was missing, though at least he still had everything else in his duffle bag and most of his money. And all calling did, it turned out, was tell them that the rest of Zelko's group had gone south. It didn't get them south.

They hitched rides, sometimes. Talked suspicious strangers into letting them sleep in their houses when they could. Slept under the stars when they couldn't.

On that first night Zelko gave him the gun he'd had strapped to his ankle and gave him a crash course in firearms safety. And when that was done, asked if he could kiss Tsuyoshi again.

"You better," Tsuyoshi said.

The best way to stop his hands shaking was to put them on Zelko's body.

*

The further south, the more they got shot at, and the more they had to change their route to avoid bombing. Zelko's phone stopped being useful every time it ran out of charge.

Zelko kept saying things like, "On the upside, it's pretty hard to shoot someone from a distance. Chances are most shots will miss us."

That was less reassuring the first time Tsuyoshi tried to shoot someone. An encounter at a gas station led to Tsuyoshi blowing a hole in someone's arm.

"You have a natural aptitude for it," Zelko said as they were running away.

Zelko taught Tsuyoshi how to shoot, so Tsuyoshi taught Zelko how to steal as soon as he was in danger of running out of shells. For weeks, they relied totally on each other. Zelko was his constant in the dark, his left hand in the light.

"You and me against the world," Zelko said, trailing his fingers across Tsuyoshi's face. The abandoned building they were in was probably full of bugs and diseases, but in that moment he couldn't even make himself worry.

"You say that now but when we go back to the normal world you'll go back home and forget about the weird Canadian guy you met on the worst Eastern European vacation ever."

"How could I forget someone as good looking as you?"

"I am beautiful. That is true."

But Zelko's eyes were sincere. "I know we live in different countries but I can't go back to not knowing you. We'll make it work."

Tsuyoshi tried to smile but it felt like his face had forgotten how.

"Anyway, what's so weird about you? This situation isn't normal, but you're as normal as it gets," Zelko said.

Maybe it was the strange magic of the night, quiet but for their words and the distant noise of occasional gunfire, that made Tsuyoshi look into the distance and release his secret. He'd been holding it tight so long. "Sometimes I think I see... corpses trying to talk to me. That's how crazy I am."

"You see them too?"

"What?" Tsuyoshi searched Zelko's face for any trace of humour and found nothing but the same shock he felt.

"I've never told anyone about the ghosts. See, it's destiny. I knew the first time I saw you that I had to know you."

Tsuyoshi couldn't find the words to speak. They talked in body language instead.

*

By the they finally stumbled on Zelko's NACEMC buddies, Tsuyoshi felt like they'd bonded with super glue. Which made everything about meeting new people that much more uncomfortable.

The first one they met looked honestly surprised they'd survived. Or surprised in general, maybe.

"Hello, Milo," Zelko said, all casual like.

Milo raised his eyebrows as he looked at Tsuyoshi. "Who's that?"

Tsuyoshi managed to remind himself not to either shrink into a ball or mouth off over nothing, which felt like a triumph by that point.

"This is..." Zelko and Tsuyoshi looked at each other. Then Zelko nodded and looked back at Milo. "This is my boyfriend. I have a boyfriend now."

"Okay."

"Do you have a problem with it?" Zelko asked, eyebrows raised.

"Just surprised. You didn't know this person three weeks ago," Milo said.

Zelko grasped his hand like a statement.

And then they were meeting the doctor and her son, and Zelko's boss, and half a dozen people besides, then heading to Georgia to take the gate, and the crash, and Jin throwing Angharad out of a vehicle at him.

All the way up to this moment, three months after the crash, where Tsuyoshi was lying in a hospital bed, pretending to sleep, trying not to laugh at two of the best and strangest people he knew.

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