The Dark and the Light
Sep
07
Where the light meets the dark, hands wound together like an unspoken promise, backs met and hands on their swords.
The Rock They Break Themselves Against (Interactive Fiction)
Oct
23
You reflect.
It’s what you do.
Noise you don’t want to hear, fists thrown, bullets fired—all of it bounces back and strikes your attacker with the slightest bit of your attention, or even less.
Count
May
06
They count coup: confirmed kills, unverified kills—which covers the halo of supposed inhabitants or workers within a given area when they destroy en masse—and sometimes when the weight gets too heavy, they count things they aren’t required to.
“Five confirmed lives saved. Seventeen unverified.”
“Ten confirmed saved.”
They pass the tea back and forth, alcohol warm on throats too young to be drinking it, and it almost washes away the taste of blood in the backs of their mouths.
Because they don’t care about those numbers. They care about mission success rates, intelligence gathered, acceptable cost.
“Mission success.”
Success
May
06
They add up successful missions over time, beads on a string, but though somewhere in Department headquarters someone tracks absolute numbers, Team 95 only tracks percentages. Ninety-nine percent mission success rate, with the closest hewing to planned acceptable losses across the Projects.
They control the flow of Baganechi raiders around international trade in the region, build intelligence networks, and exploit them ruthlessly, knock problem leaders out of power, manipulate chosen leaders in.
It’s bloody, it’s violent, they’re all too familiar with working in shadows and dealing in bodies and lives.
“Minimize the blood, Skylight,” Wolf murmurs. “Save some of them.”
Smiles
May
06
Stream keeps them laughing. They all have a thing, and that one’s his. He supports and smiles and draws smiles from their lips because at the end of the day, they have to survive this childhood and teenagerhood and time spent as a living weapon before they finally come out the other end.
He counts them sometimes, the smiles he draws from Ice Queen that reach her eyes, the number of times Math’s quiet laugh breaks the stillness, the outright chuckles he can coax from Bridge.
At base, each day he claims dozens. On missions, he’s lucky to get five.
Minimal
May
06
Skylight has made blood of the regions they serve in. The Ogunn block of nations is bloody enough without their team dipping in their hand, but when it comes to mission parameters, it’s Wolf that decides acceptable cost, and Skylight that tells her the options available.
“Minimize the blood,” Wolf says, slowly, thoughtfully, knowing there will be some other cost for even that.
And Skylight minimizes the blood, taking it down from thousands to hundreds to dozens before she digs in both her metaphorical feet and tells her leader, “That is the minimum.”
Fifty-six people dead to achieve their goals.
Blood
May
06
They’re older, practically grown, when Skylight broods for a moment, considering the dance they’re practicing. She isn’t given to brooding, though he’s heard she knits her brows in concentration or thought quite frequently. But she doesn’t hesitate, until she asks for a goal and the instructor says, “Just dance.”
It’s an outside instructor. He doesn’t realize there’s always a goal—whether seduction, intelligence gathering, or even assassination.
“Sex, blood, and violence,” Math murmurs. The mortar with which empires are made. “Arc is the sex, Ice Queen is the violence, and you’re the blood. And that’s okay.”
They dance for blood.
Cold
May
06
She feels all cold inside. They call her Ice Queen, and there are times when the name truly fits, when they bring down their rules and their punishments and she stares back at them with icy uncaring defiance of a kind they can’t do much with.
But most of the time, she feels aflame with all she wants and all the viciousness she can bring to bear on a mission.
Right now, she’s just razed an encampment to the ground in service of the mission. Right now, she feels cold, like a wind blows through her.
She reports. “It’s done.”
Hates to Kill
Mar
12
Skylight whispers warm, sweet nothings against his ear. Math can barely even make out the sounds into proper language, but it doesn’t really matter. That’s not what he’s listening to.
It’s her heart he hears, her love, the way she doesn’t judge him for taking deep, ragged breaths while he tries to deal with everything he’s just seen and done. Math hates to kill, only does it when he must.
They were told it was a military target, not a civilian one, and for once they hadn’t had time to gather their own intel first.
But they were lied to.
Breaking Points
Jan
07
There were moments when all anyone could think about was the blood on their hands, their fallen team members—something not quite family but beyond mere friends—and their own willingness to go bloody themselves again.
Bloodless
May
18
Kyouka dreams sometimes of her mother, her old life, the before that might have been. She dreams sometimes of the future, of Atsushi and the Armed Detective Agency, of eating tofu on bright summer days.
A knife is in her hand. You have to kill in order to save them.
She stares at the blade and whispers to herself, “No.” Those days are behind her. Demon Snow is behind her, sword out, eyes blank and promising.
“No,” Kyouka says and throws herself into battle to fight the enemy and save whoever her dream has concocted.
She wakes with bloodless hands.
Weapon
Feb
22
The girl’s golden brown skin was coated in blood. It had splattered across her arms, her heathered green tank top and trousers, and the military boots she wore.
Her grey eyes were grim, her mouth a straight slash, but she seemed to catalogue the bodies surrounding her with mechanical detachment. The troop captain stared at her in horror. He’d been sent to extract a thirteen-year-old girl—not this.
She shrugged her shoulders, and something silver and shimmery poured out of her skin, covering her before flowing across the pile of bodies. It vanished, and with it, the dead and the blood.
Who Do You Think I Am? (poem)
Feb
08
Who do you think I am? the daughter of pain
Once upon a time I knew my name
You think I am the monster in the night
And never asked who taught me how to fight (more…)
Teller, Taker
Apr
30
Word came at dawn of the newly outfitted military station in Westerfields, that vast uninhabited territory between Glaston and Edyll, both kingdoms cities. A quick reconnaissance by interested parties (read: operatives) identified standard and, to them, quite familiar signs of Thorn Republic activity. Once upon a time, those operatives had been the source of those signs, and they knew their own, besides any other departments Thorn might tap to do their dirty work.