don't say it. i already know.
Wahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Yes.
That is all I have to say for myself, other than an apology for all the typos that you will encounter, as it is close to midnight and I am lazy to edit.
Anyway. Enjoy. And I pray you all won't hate me after.
“Let me get this straight. Over handpicking a squadron of five from the rest of our buddies at SFU-010, Yasamu asked you to accompany him to Skullspont alone.”
“Yes. I bet you wish you were in my position right about now.”
Alistair snapped on the guards of his flight suit over his arms, absentmindedly side-stepping the helmet thrown in his direction. The veteran ran a hand through his long gray hair and squared up his gaze to the small mirror just within the door of his locker, briefly brushing over the other pilot’s figure from where she stood behind him, fresh from the murder path.
“Don’t think you can cocky just because your little brother lets you have some every night.”
“Of course.”
Summer and autumn had come and went, and with it the tides of war had swung in CLOVER’s favor. With the Special Forces Squadrons on the field, the organization had finally succeeded in breaking through the barricade of battlecruisers that the Confederate Alliance had set up in Parvonis Space, thus charging forward and claiming almost two-thirds of the whole sector and all its resources. This left CLOVER in an excellent position to rally their forces and overrun the Sol Star System, crushing the Confederate Alliance once and for all.
True to their mandate, CLOVER SFU-010 - Yasamu Shinta’s squadron - had been asked to oversee one of the bigger operations aimed at leading the organization to this scenario, with success. Yasamu and the rest of his team was more than happy to follow orders… it had been a long time since they had seen battles worth their caliber, and spearheading activity of that sort would put them right into the line of fire and glory. For a honor-bound man like Yasamu, this was all he could have ever wanted.
A man of lesser intellectuality might have thought Alistair would be disturbed by all of this… once, long ago, he had marched alongside Confederate Alliance soldiers, and had even called one squadron leader among their thousands ‘father’ in place of the bum that had sired him. It had, however, more than two decades since that time, and in the light of the way things were now the C.A. had never been home. Not the way the Eden Star System and CLOVER’s armed forces had been. Not the way the Shinta had been.
“Seriously, though, I find it odd how he’s calling you out like this. Maybe he’s finally figured it out.”
Major Alistair Mordechai, the 24-year old corps executive officer of CLOVER Special Forces Unit 010 and pilot of the Pariah rymer unit. Having been born and raised on the battlefield, he was the veteran of many campaigns, and all of them had proved successful save for the one that had turned his fate, bringing him into the Shinta household as an adopted son of the now deceased General Mitsuoumi Shinta and his wife Junko. With all this experience beneath his belt, he had convinced himself he feared nothing. Now, all of a sudden the prospect of flying solo with his brother was an experience he’d sooner jump three continents to avoid rather than live through.
“I’ll see you at Skullspont in the next week or so, Natalia. Keep the brats out of trouble until you arrive.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
Gathering his helmet, his flight gloves and his wits about him, Alistair closed the locker and stepped out of the room, letting the door slide shut on Natalia’s mocking smile.
***
Four days later and over two thousand miles away, Yasamu Shinta walked through the Skullspont’s corridors on his lonesome, waving off the usual round of salutes sent in his direction and dodging the occasional workbot that came rushing in from the various corners of the mountain base. After several decisive victories under his command, the Confederate Alliance forces in the area had been driven off, thus giving the first son of the Shinta some well-deserved time to himself.
Finally, at long last, he could attend to an issue that had been sitting with him for quite some time. In the past, his duties as an officer in CLOVER’s armed forces had prevented him from acting on many of his suspicions… it had taken careful planning and discreet execution to get him to where he was now, en-route to Skullspont’s hangar deck. Alistair would be there. He hadn’t lived and fought with the man and even called him his brother to know him almost as well as he knew himself.
The hangar deck was filled to capacity with units displaying the several hundred ways to batter up your fighter jet or rymer unit in battle; CLOVER personnel in flight suits and technician jumps moved about along with miniature transports bearing ammunition and spare parts to the survivors even as they hauled wreckage and ruin away for the dumps. Yasamu managed to blend in well with all of this activity, and avoided unwanted attention as he made his way towards the wing reserved for the rymers of the Special Forces pilots, approaching the dark, brooding figure of the Pariah that loomed in the distance. The sounds of nanomachines at work and good, old fashioned manual labor via toolbox carried over the din to him as he came to stand beneath the large rymer’s shadow, looking up towards the cockpit area.
“Yo.”
The bolt-turning and drive-ins halted, and a moment afterward Alistair was peering over the edge of the Pariah’s arm, surveying Yasamu with raised eyebrows. “I thought you were asleep already,” the gray-haired pilot said after a moment. “You said you were tired.”
“Can’t sleep just like that… you know how I am right after firefights.”
“Mm. Well. The skirmish this time was particularly bad.”
“Yeah… so. Wanna go down to the bar? Drinks are on the house because we won.”
“I’ll pass. I have to check the calibration adjustments on this old lug’s weaponry. It wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to earlier.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t notice.”
Alistair, apparently ignoring the wry note in his brother’s voice, disappeared from sight once again to return to what he had been doing. Yasamu pulled up a crate beside the ripcord leading up to the Pariah’s cockpit area and sat down, reaching into his flight suit for his customary pack of cigarettes. Around them, CLOVER’s world continued to turn with men and women on the battlefield, killing themselves a little more with each passing day.
“I’ve noticed that you’ve been busy lately.”
“Mm.”
“I never seem to get a hold on you nowadays. I always end up hanging around with Natalia… never seen so many motel rooms in my life. Of course,” Yasamu added as he took a drag, “we don’t really do anything in the end, whether she’s all over me or not. I guess it’s funny that way.”
“It is.”
“That wouldn’t be the case if you were around regularly, the way you used to be.”
“Sorry. The usual shit’s been keeping me occupied. You know. CLOVER stuff and all.”
“Yeah - I can relate to that. Still, I figured that the organization might not be the real reason, you know? I thought that you managed to get yourself a woman. Or a girl. Something like that.” He exhaled into the cold air, stopping a moment to watch the smoke curl and dissipate around him. “Then, I remembered how things used to be with you and I and the rest of the batch in the Academy, and I figured maybe it’s another guy. That’s cool by me. It’s always been.”
Silence echoed in response to his words, interrupted only by the sound of Alistair at work. Yasamu took another drag, and collected the words scattered about at his feet.
“Another guy, you know, like our younger brother.”
Yasamu looked on serenely as his brother’s toolbox crashed to the floor, spilling its contents all over the place. He put out his cigarette. “Don’t worry,” he shouted up, towards the Pariah’s cockpit area. “I’ll clean it up for you.” He stood up at the grunt he heard in response and fulfilled his word, waving off any cadets who tried to offer him assistance. He set the toolbox aside when he was finished and then stepped towards the ripcord, sliding a foot into the balancer and tugging at the rope.
“I’m coming up, if you don’t mind.”
Alistair never answered. Yasamu ascended to find his brother sitting back in the cockpit of his unit, cigarette perched on lips and lighter between quavering fingers. He was trying, unsuccessfully, to light up. The gray-haired pilot’s gaze flickered up to meet with his own the moment he came around only to flinch away just as quickly. It was hard to meet up to a steady, unblinking look like that.
“Lighter won’t work,” he put in rather lamely. Yasamu took it all into stride and did the honors for him.
Seventy times seven apologies and hundreds of other things ran circles through Alistair’s thoughts just then, tumbling about and crashing in on themselves before any one of them ever reached a level of coherence suitable for delivery. The fact that Yasamu was with him now, leaning into the cockpit of his mech and giving him The Look that had made him famous back in the Academy didn’t help much. When he finally managed to work out an excuse that would put at least several thousand kilometers between him and his brothers, it was four simple words and a hand on his shoulder than put him back where he was.
“Hey. It’s all right.”
You, Yasamu Shinta, are an asshole.
Here I am before you, ready to receive due punishment for my ghastly ways - not to mention continuously screwing our younger brother behind your back - and you stand there and smile and tell me it’s FINE?
Alistair, being a man of admirable resolve, did not open his mouth and say any of this; he only sat there, staring at Yasamu as though the latter had suddenly broken into song in a valiant attempt at delivering Eden’s national anthem in falsetto. Yasamu, in turn, found this highly amusing, and clapped the other pilot’s shoulder again with an easy laugh.
“I’m serious. You don’t want to believe me? It’s fine. Hikaru’s a looker… there’s nothing I can do about that. Besides, better you than anyone else. That way, at least if you’re the one who ends up hurting him, I’ll still have everything under control. Not like you’d do that anyway, right? At least, not the way I wouldn’t want you to.”
“When did you…?”
“Oh, maybe two months back, when I started really getting tired of Natalia throwing herself at me every time the two of you disappeared on us. She didn’t tell me anything, mind you… I kinda put two and two together there. So, I’m fine with it. Just take things in moderation, all right? I wouldn’t want you wearing him out before any big missions, knowing how you are with your partners.”
Alistair didn’t know whether to laugh at that or take Yasamu by the shoulders and attempt to shake out the demons that had possessed his brother. Yasamu was on his way back down to the hangar deck before he could decide on what to do.
“I’ll talk to Hikaru about this in my own time. For now, let’s head down to the bar already…. I’m not about to miss happy hour to sentimentality like this.”
Yasamu Shinta of the straight-laced, one-track mind. Alistair followed him.
***
January 19, U.E.F.S Year 015. On that day, almost a month into CLOVER’s Operation Megiddo and less than two weeks after Alistair and Yasamu’s conversation, Yasamu Shinta was declared MIA in the Requiem, the most treacherous area of Asakusa Pass.
CLOVER SFU-010, twenty-seven men strong, had entered Asakusa Pass on the pretense of crossing through the debris-ridden sector, using it as a shortcut to reach the Confederate Alliance fleet waiting unsuspecting of anything at the other end. Only nine units ended up making it out alive, and one among the casualties happened to be the squadron’s leader. Nobody knows exactly what occurred in Asakusa, only that the appearance of the enemy in great droves had sped some of the organization’s most talented pilots to their graves.
Suffice to say, the blow dealt upon CLOVER shook the force but came far from crippling them. In retaliation to losing two-thirds of their greatest fighters and one of the rising stars of their organization, CLOVER launched a decisive counterattack spearheaded by SFU-010’s surviving units, taking the targeted Confederate Alliance factories and special units by storm within the following months. CLOVER, especially their dragoons in the Special Forces, did not rest in pursuit of vengeance, and it was their drive that left every C.A. unit standing in their way dead.
March 29, U.E.F.S Year 015. The victorious CLOVER returned from their conquest of the Sol Star System and the Confederate Alliance to honor their heroes and bury their dead. CLOVER SFU-010 came out of the initial promotions ceremony highly praised and decorated with metals and positions honoring their valor. It was a pretty farce in their eyes, a futile attempt at distracting them from the bittersweet sacrifice that had brought them to where they were at that moment. Yasamu was buried that same day.
Some time after the ceremony, when everything had been said and done at last, Alistair Mordechai - now the commanding officer of CLOVER SFU-010 in Yasamu’s place - withdrew to his flat to sit in the darkness, smoke his cigarettes, and brood upon the bloody slideshow of Asakusa Pass playing out in a sinister loop through his thoughts. In his room, beyond the door, Hikaru was curled up into a little ball of sheets and sorrow on his bed, where sleep would never come.
Earlier, the two of them had come together as they had never done before. Alistair, bound up by the anger that had taken a hold of him ever since he had seen Yasamu Shinta’s plane downed by Enemy Pilot Designation 266, had demanded much of the young man; he had turned his rage into desire and let it blow out of control. There had been something saddening about their coupling that evening, as though it was the only shield they could rip out from their hearts and put up against the ghosts echoing through the corridors.
Hikaru had been quiet throughout it all, barely making a sound even as Alistair sought to push him down to break and ruin; the young man had lain there, eyes shut and body slack, yielding to whatever his partner wanted to do, whether it was to kiss him or hurt him. It was only afterward that Alistair had felt it; that shudder that was not quite a sob but never a laugh from the fragile thing he held in his arms when they were done, the quakes of one man shaking and falling apart. He had let Hikaru go after that, and silently left the room, shutting the door to the sound of his younger brother crying.
Alistair shut the memory away, closeting it under lock and key. The bottle was deep, he realized as he raised the alcoholic goodness to his lips. It was deeper than hope, deeper than despair, and worth more than anyone’s tears or anger or pain would ever be.
Take care of things for me. This won’t be the last time.
Mother’s smile burned in his vision, echoed by the look in Yasamu’s eyes when his brother had bid him goodbye. Alistair took the first swig, drowning it out in foam and oblivion.
Outside, it began to rain.
*runs off and hides*
Yes.
That is all I have to say for myself, other than an apology for all the typos that you will encounter, as it is close to midnight and I am lazy to edit.
Anyway. Enjoy. And I pray you all won't hate me after.
“Let me get this straight. Over handpicking a squadron of five from the rest of our buddies at SFU-010, Yasamu asked you to accompany him to Skullspont alone.”
“Yes. I bet you wish you were in my position right about now.”
Alistair snapped on the guards of his flight suit over his arms, absentmindedly side-stepping the helmet thrown in his direction. The veteran ran a hand through his long gray hair and squared up his gaze to the small mirror just within the door of his locker, briefly brushing over the other pilot’s figure from where she stood behind him, fresh from the murder path.
“Don’t think you can cocky just because your little brother lets you have some every night.”
“Of course.”
Summer and autumn had come and went, and with it the tides of war had swung in CLOVER’s favor. With the Special Forces Squadrons on the field, the organization had finally succeeded in breaking through the barricade of battlecruisers that the Confederate Alliance had set up in Parvonis Space, thus charging forward and claiming almost two-thirds of the whole sector and all its resources. This left CLOVER in an excellent position to rally their forces and overrun the Sol Star System, crushing the Confederate Alliance once and for all.
True to their mandate, CLOVER SFU-010 - Yasamu Shinta’s squadron - had been asked to oversee one of the bigger operations aimed at leading the organization to this scenario, with success. Yasamu and the rest of his team was more than happy to follow orders… it had been a long time since they had seen battles worth their caliber, and spearheading activity of that sort would put them right into the line of fire and glory. For a honor-bound man like Yasamu, this was all he could have ever wanted.
A man of lesser intellectuality might have thought Alistair would be disturbed by all of this… once, long ago, he had marched alongside Confederate Alliance soldiers, and had even called one squadron leader among their thousands ‘father’ in place of the bum that had sired him. It had, however, more than two decades since that time, and in the light of the way things were now the C.A. had never been home. Not the way the Eden Star System and CLOVER’s armed forces had been. Not the way the Shinta had been.
“Seriously, though, I find it odd how he’s calling you out like this. Maybe he’s finally figured it out.”
Major Alistair Mordechai, the 24-year old corps executive officer of CLOVER Special Forces Unit 010 and pilot of the Pariah rymer unit. Having been born and raised on the battlefield, he was the veteran of many campaigns, and all of them had proved successful save for the one that had turned his fate, bringing him into the Shinta household as an adopted son of the now deceased General Mitsuoumi Shinta and his wife Junko. With all this experience beneath his belt, he had convinced himself he feared nothing. Now, all of a sudden the prospect of flying solo with his brother was an experience he’d sooner jump three continents to avoid rather than live through.
“I’ll see you at Skullspont in the next week or so, Natalia. Keep the brats out of trouble until you arrive.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
Gathering his helmet, his flight gloves and his wits about him, Alistair closed the locker and stepped out of the room, letting the door slide shut on Natalia’s mocking smile.
***
Four days later and over two thousand miles away, Yasamu Shinta walked through the Skullspont’s corridors on his lonesome, waving off the usual round of salutes sent in his direction and dodging the occasional workbot that came rushing in from the various corners of the mountain base. After several decisive victories under his command, the Confederate Alliance forces in the area had been driven off, thus giving the first son of the Shinta some well-deserved time to himself.
Finally, at long last, he could attend to an issue that had been sitting with him for quite some time. In the past, his duties as an officer in CLOVER’s armed forces had prevented him from acting on many of his suspicions… it had taken careful planning and discreet execution to get him to where he was now, en-route to Skullspont’s hangar deck. Alistair would be there. He hadn’t lived and fought with the man and even called him his brother to know him almost as well as he knew himself.
The hangar deck was filled to capacity with units displaying the several hundred ways to batter up your fighter jet or rymer unit in battle; CLOVER personnel in flight suits and technician jumps moved about along with miniature transports bearing ammunition and spare parts to the survivors even as they hauled wreckage and ruin away for the dumps. Yasamu managed to blend in well with all of this activity, and avoided unwanted attention as he made his way towards the wing reserved for the rymers of the Special Forces pilots, approaching the dark, brooding figure of the Pariah that loomed in the distance. The sounds of nanomachines at work and good, old fashioned manual labor via toolbox carried over the din to him as he came to stand beneath the large rymer’s shadow, looking up towards the cockpit area.
“Yo.”
The bolt-turning and drive-ins halted, and a moment afterward Alistair was peering over the edge of the Pariah’s arm, surveying Yasamu with raised eyebrows. “I thought you were asleep already,” the gray-haired pilot said after a moment. “You said you were tired.”
“Can’t sleep just like that… you know how I am right after firefights.”
“Mm. Well. The skirmish this time was particularly bad.”
“Yeah… so. Wanna go down to the bar? Drinks are on the house because we won.”
“I’ll pass. I have to check the calibration adjustments on this old lug’s weaponry. It wasn’t responding the way I wanted it to earlier.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t notice.”
Alistair, apparently ignoring the wry note in his brother’s voice, disappeared from sight once again to return to what he had been doing. Yasamu pulled up a crate beside the ripcord leading up to the Pariah’s cockpit area and sat down, reaching into his flight suit for his customary pack of cigarettes. Around them, CLOVER’s world continued to turn with men and women on the battlefield, killing themselves a little more with each passing day.
“I’ve noticed that you’ve been busy lately.”
“Mm.”
“I never seem to get a hold on you nowadays. I always end up hanging around with Natalia… never seen so many motel rooms in my life. Of course,” Yasamu added as he took a drag, “we don’t really do anything in the end, whether she’s all over me or not. I guess it’s funny that way.”
“It is.”
“That wouldn’t be the case if you were around regularly, the way you used to be.”
“Sorry. The usual shit’s been keeping me occupied. You know. CLOVER stuff and all.”
“Yeah - I can relate to that. Still, I figured that the organization might not be the real reason, you know? I thought that you managed to get yourself a woman. Or a girl. Something like that.” He exhaled into the cold air, stopping a moment to watch the smoke curl and dissipate around him. “Then, I remembered how things used to be with you and I and the rest of the batch in the Academy, and I figured maybe it’s another guy. That’s cool by me. It’s always been.”
Silence echoed in response to his words, interrupted only by the sound of Alistair at work. Yasamu took another drag, and collected the words scattered about at his feet.
“Another guy, you know, like our younger brother.”
Yasamu looked on serenely as his brother’s toolbox crashed to the floor, spilling its contents all over the place. He put out his cigarette. “Don’t worry,” he shouted up, towards the Pariah’s cockpit area. “I’ll clean it up for you.” He stood up at the grunt he heard in response and fulfilled his word, waving off any cadets who tried to offer him assistance. He set the toolbox aside when he was finished and then stepped towards the ripcord, sliding a foot into the balancer and tugging at the rope.
“I’m coming up, if you don’t mind.”
Alistair never answered. Yasamu ascended to find his brother sitting back in the cockpit of his unit, cigarette perched on lips and lighter between quavering fingers. He was trying, unsuccessfully, to light up. The gray-haired pilot’s gaze flickered up to meet with his own the moment he came around only to flinch away just as quickly. It was hard to meet up to a steady, unblinking look like that.
“Lighter won’t work,” he put in rather lamely. Yasamu took it all into stride and did the honors for him.
Seventy times seven apologies and hundreds of other things ran circles through Alistair’s thoughts just then, tumbling about and crashing in on themselves before any one of them ever reached a level of coherence suitable for delivery. The fact that Yasamu was with him now, leaning into the cockpit of his mech and giving him The Look that had made him famous back in the Academy didn’t help much. When he finally managed to work out an excuse that would put at least several thousand kilometers between him and his brothers, it was four simple words and a hand on his shoulder than put him back where he was.
“Hey. It’s all right.”
You, Yasamu Shinta, are an asshole.
Here I am before you, ready to receive due punishment for my ghastly ways - not to mention continuously screwing our younger brother behind your back - and you stand there and smile and tell me it’s FINE?
Alistair, being a man of admirable resolve, did not open his mouth and say any of this; he only sat there, staring at Yasamu as though the latter had suddenly broken into song in a valiant attempt at delivering Eden’s national anthem in falsetto. Yasamu, in turn, found this highly amusing, and clapped the other pilot’s shoulder again with an easy laugh.
“I’m serious. You don’t want to believe me? It’s fine. Hikaru’s a looker… there’s nothing I can do about that. Besides, better you than anyone else. That way, at least if you’re the one who ends up hurting him, I’ll still have everything under control. Not like you’d do that anyway, right? At least, not the way I wouldn’t want you to.”
“When did you…?”
“Oh, maybe two months back, when I started really getting tired of Natalia throwing herself at me every time the two of you disappeared on us. She didn’t tell me anything, mind you… I kinda put two and two together there. So, I’m fine with it. Just take things in moderation, all right? I wouldn’t want you wearing him out before any big missions, knowing how you are with your partners.”
Alistair didn’t know whether to laugh at that or take Yasamu by the shoulders and attempt to shake out the demons that had possessed his brother. Yasamu was on his way back down to the hangar deck before he could decide on what to do.
“I’ll talk to Hikaru about this in my own time. For now, let’s head down to the bar already…. I’m not about to miss happy hour to sentimentality like this.”
Yasamu Shinta of the straight-laced, one-track mind. Alistair followed him.
***
January 19, U.E.F.S Year 015. On that day, almost a month into CLOVER’s Operation Megiddo and less than two weeks after Alistair and Yasamu’s conversation, Yasamu Shinta was declared MIA in the Requiem, the most treacherous area of Asakusa Pass.
CLOVER SFU-010, twenty-seven men strong, had entered Asakusa Pass on the pretense of crossing through the debris-ridden sector, using it as a shortcut to reach the Confederate Alliance fleet waiting unsuspecting of anything at the other end. Only nine units ended up making it out alive, and one among the casualties happened to be the squadron’s leader. Nobody knows exactly what occurred in Asakusa, only that the appearance of the enemy in great droves had sped some of the organization’s most talented pilots to their graves.
Suffice to say, the blow dealt upon CLOVER shook the force but came far from crippling them. In retaliation to losing two-thirds of their greatest fighters and one of the rising stars of their organization, CLOVER launched a decisive counterattack spearheaded by SFU-010’s surviving units, taking the targeted Confederate Alliance factories and special units by storm within the following months. CLOVER, especially their dragoons in the Special Forces, did not rest in pursuit of vengeance, and it was their drive that left every C.A. unit standing in their way dead.
March 29, U.E.F.S Year 015. The victorious CLOVER returned from their conquest of the Sol Star System and the Confederate Alliance to honor their heroes and bury their dead. CLOVER SFU-010 came out of the initial promotions ceremony highly praised and decorated with metals and positions honoring their valor. It was a pretty farce in their eyes, a futile attempt at distracting them from the bittersweet sacrifice that had brought them to where they were at that moment. Yasamu was buried that same day.
Some time after the ceremony, when everything had been said and done at last, Alistair Mordechai - now the commanding officer of CLOVER SFU-010 in Yasamu’s place - withdrew to his flat to sit in the darkness, smoke his cigarettes, and brood upon the bloody slideshow of Asakusa Pass playing out in a sinister loop through his thoughts. In his room, beyond the door, Hikaru was curled up into a little ball of sheets and sorrow on his bed, where sleep would never come.
Earlier, the two of them had come together as they had never done before. Alistair, bound up by the anger that had taken a hold of him ever since he had seen Yasamu Shinta’s plane downed by Enemy Pilot Designation 266, had demanded much of the young man; he had turned his rage into desire and let it blow out of control. There had been something saddening about their coupling that evening, as though it was the only shield they could rip out from their hearts and put up against the ghosts echoing through the corridors.
Hikaru had been quiet throughout it all, barely making a sound even as Alistair sought to push him down to break and ruin; the young man had lain there, eyes shut and body slack, yielding to whatever his partner wanted to do, whether it was to kiss him or hurt him. It was only afterward that Alistair had felt it; that shudder that was not quite a sob but never a laugh from the fragile thing he held in his arms when they were done, the quakes of one man shaking and falling apart. He had let Hikaru go after that, and silently left the room, shutting the door to the sound of his younger brother crying.
Alistair shut the memory away, closeting it under lock and key. The bottle was deep, he realized as he raised the alcoholic goodness to his lips. It was deeper than hope, deeper than despair, and worth more than anyone’s tears or anger or pain would ever be.
Take care of things for me. This won’t be the last time.
Mother’s smile burned in his vision, echoed by the look in Yasamu’s eyes when his brother had bid him goodbye. Alistair took the first swig, drowning it out in foam and oblivion.
Outside, it began to rain.
*runs off and hides*