for kawuli: Alister meets the Victors
Happy Christmas! May your day be filled with far less /o\ than poor Alister, who really deserves better.
“Sara,” Alister says, in a very calm, reasonable voice. He perfected that voice over years of Peacekeeping, following orders that jarred something deep inside him like splinters of bone scraping against soft tissue, and then again during the war as he found himself increasingly having to say things like no, Sara, we can’t just ‘blow it all up’ once a week. “You said we were meeting your girlfriend and her friends.”
Sara blinks at him, eyes wide and innocent, sweet snow on an avalanche, he should have seen this coming. “We are.”
Alister takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I assumed you meant her gearhead friends.”
“Oh, I’m aware.” Sara grins now, all loose limbs and shark teeth, and she leans back and hums to herself as she steers the truck down a dirt road that Alister could identify by hovercraft by the time he was a junior cadet but has never, ever so much as stepped foot on because no one ever does. “If I’d said anything you would have gotten all weird about it. This way you get about ten minutes to hyperventilate. Perfect amount of time.”
“Sara,” Alister says again, helpless. He looks down at his feet, still a good feet away from the front edge of the cab. Thinks about all the time he spent in Nine, crammed into vehicles too small for him. Thinks of Sara, hopping the inter-district trains and catching public transportation and hitching rides whenever she’s in Two. Whose truck is this? A hard scrabble starts up in his chest.
“You’ll be fine.” Sara drums the flats of her fingers on the steering wheel absently. “I’ve told them all about you, anyway. They’re all very impressed and really want to meet you.”
Alister is not a star-struck twelve-year-old with a collection of braided bands and no beads around his wrist. He is an adult with half a bloody career behind him, a rebel and war veteran and a host of other things that nowadays mostly add up to ‘tired’. He also wants to roll down the window and vomit over the side of the truck. No big deal. Instead he looks out the window at the road ahead, twisting its way through thick lines of pine, spruce, and cedar.
Part of him can’t believe it’s not a prank until Sara pulls the truck in along the tall white fence, ten feet high and completely unwelcoming from the outside. “Do they normally host a lot of parties?” he asks, unable to help himself. He knows the new regime is pushing the reunification angle, and with that comes the demystification of the Victors, but he didn’t think that meant opening the Village up as a party venue.
Sara throws the truck into park and pushes open the driver’s side door. “Rokia lives here,” she says, her voice doing a weird thing like she tried for exaggerated, put-upon patience but also for extreme casualness at the same time. Either way Alister only blinks at her. “She moved in with Lyme after the war. Or, well, once Lyme finally got her to stop living out of her garage, anyway. Been like that for a while now.”
Alister takes the walk around the side of the wall to process that one. He knew Sara had a thing with a Victor during the war, they all did, but from what he knew of the Sixes they’d been quiet and kept to themselves. Sara’s priority had been getting Rokia of the whole mess alive, and Alister’s had been making sure that didn’t interfere with the bigger picture. It didn’t, and Rokia did, and that was the end of their circles overlapping. Sara’s girl hobnobbing with the who’s who of District 2 is a whole new mess of information that Alister needs to digest quickly.
Like. Really, really quickly.
It’s fine, at first. Rokia meets them at the gate, hands curled in the hem of her sleeves, and Sara folds her in against her side and presses a kiss to her cheek and then they’re off, following the sound of laughter and general merriment. And funny enough from there it’s almost easy: Alister is a Peacekeeper, or was, and he didn’t rub elbows with Victors like the high-ranking officers but he knows how to behave around important people. He squares his shoulders, digs down deep past the war and the years of service and the Academy to the old memories of image training, and it’s not all that hard to smile and throw back banter as though his childhood heroes are just another squadron kicking loose after a long day.
(It helps that there are less of them. They’ve learned to fill the gaps now, no conspicuous empty spaces at the picnic benches or conversation circles, but the Victors lost people and they’re still finding that balance with everyone who’s left. Alister could wrap himself in a quilt stitched from squares representing the people he failed to save, and so he takes - not comfort, exactly, but a breath of understanding.)
The conversations are a weird kind of dance, skirting those things that no one talks about. The war, the fighting, who he lost. Why he turned, what pushed him over the edge, whether it was a slow drip by drip over months and years or a rushing flood all at once. Sometimes people ask. Sometimes they challenge, hostility bristling along every line of muscle. Alister rarely answers. The Victors, at least, don’t go there at all. They also - thank the mountains - don’t ask him about his bracelet or his weapons specialty back in his Centre days or any of the other things he’d feared a bunch of glory-days champions might think it fun to obsess over.
Brutus asks about his hobbies, then actually makes a disappointed dad face when Alister says it’s been a while since he’s really found the time. Adessa frowns and grills him on his eating schedule, concluding that he needs to focus more on regular protein intake and also work harder to get some fresh greens. Artemisia has a surprising wealth of knowledge about incendiaries, which she declares goes back to a checkered past as a juvenile pyromaniac, then grins and asks him not to hold it against her. “After all,” she says, “some of my best arresting officers were Peacekeepers.”
And Devon - Devon keeps watching him, eyes narrowed, like Alister is the final clue in a crossword puzzle he needs to finish before he can sleep in peace.
Eventually Brutus catches on. “I know that face. Can’t find him in your file?” He claps Devon on the shoulder, easygoing.
Devon has barely touched his moonshine. Alister took a sip when offered, then politely set it off to the side in the hopes everyone forgets about it, because what - the fuck. (He knows getting the hops production back online isn’t exactly a priority in a wartorn country, but it’s got to be better than whatever Devon’s brewing up here.) “I’ll get it,” he says, pointing a finger at Alister. “You’re not my year. I know I didn’t send you a congratulations letter after your Academy acceptance, so that means you’re older than I am. And you’re not making it easy on me, either, which is more telling than you think, but I can’t tell if that means you’re modest or embarrassed.”
Alister clears his throat. A beer would be real nice right about now, damn it. “You know this is a little scary to watch.”
“See, embarrassed might lead me to say we hooked up, except there’s no reason for that to be a reason for shame, we’re all adults and I’m amazing,” Devon continues, even as Brutus rolls his eyes and Sara snickers. “So that means -” He stops dead.
Alister lets out a long, slow breath and tries very hard not to think about flinging himself into the nearest lake - too far of a walk, if he remembers the topographic maps with any accuracy. “I’ve never met a Victor in my life,” he says, with all the desperation he can muster. Pretend it’s a hostage situation and the lives of fifty people depend on his ability to stay calm, composed, professional. There’s someone standing on a tripped landmine and they need him to walk them through how to jimmy the wire.
Devon’s grin spreads across his face like a splash of wine on a white dress uniform, inevitable and damning. “No you haven’t have you.” He sits back and clinks the leg of his cane against his ankle in a gesture of satisfaction. “We go way back.”
“Babe, what the hell are you -” Artemisia starts, but then understanding hits and confusion morphs into a gleeful grin. “Wait, really? Oh this is a first, it’s like a unicorn!”
A few of the Victors still look blank, but Petra lets out a wild laugh that she tries to hide by sputtering into her water, and Lyme pinches the bridge of her nose and gets up to make a conspicuous check of the game meat Brutus is grilling. Sara, meanwhile, looks back and forth from Devon to Alister, forehead scrunched. “Hey, does someone want to clue the rest of us into the little inside joke you’re all enjoying here?”
Devon glances at Sara, then Alister, and a flicker of guilt crosses his face. The Village plays by its own rules, a clear hierarchy and social understanding, who gets to tease whom with the safety of that structure around them. Alister and Sara have their own relationship, their own command structure from the war that they’re still navigating in peacetime now as allies and ex-colleagues and maybe friends. Who knows how this will affect it. Alister sees the calculation pass over Devon’s face, and under cover of Misha’s shoulder he waves his hand and flicks his fingers in a question: should I let it go?
It’s very tempting. But they’re all watching now, and Alister didn’t pull friends from the mud in pieces to be a coward over a little joking. “You brought it up, not me,” he says, reaching for his drink again. “Just remember that. I’m not the one running around flaunting it for attention.”
Artemisia is more perceptive than she looks, because she catches whatever passes between Alister and Devon and absorbs it without a word. She turns to Sara and Rokia and favours them with a sharp grin. “Devon and Alister were Centre boyfriends.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Brutus says over the barbecue. “What happens at the Centre stays at the Centre.”
Sara flings up her hands. “I like how this is supposed to explain things but now I’m even more confused.”
Artemisia takes pity on her and gives an impressively ethnographic explanation of Centre culture, though she spices it up with a few salacious anecdotes that make Sara’s eyebrows creep up her forehead and Rokia decide Lyme needs help grilling the vegetables. “Devon and Petra hold the record for the Village,” Artemisia finishes. “Male and female, respectively. Petra took out her whole year, minus one - and she got that one retroactively, so there’s debate on whether she made a clean sweep-”
“Oh my god,” Petra mutters, her face flaming red.
“- and Devon got most of his year plus a handful on either side.”
Sara looks over at Alister, understanding dawning. “Including you.”
Alister groans. “I was on my way out. I knew I’d be getting the Peacekeeper transfer soon, and it’s what I wanted but I was still itchy about it. Even if you don’t want to make it to the end, you almost want to fight it when they cut you. I’d played it safe, followed the rules. Devon offered. I figured, why not.”
“You must have been a good time,” Devon says meditatively. Alister chokes on his mouthful of paint thinner but Devon continues with either true blitheness or a masterful impression of it. “What? I don’t remember the good ones, those all blur together. I remember the bad ones.”
“Wow,” Alister says, the same time as Brutus drawls, “Sure glad we get to share this moment together.”
Artemisia only grins wider. “How about now? My Centre phase stuck, same with Devon and Petra. Brutus and Lyme kicked theirs. Did you switch teams?”
Alister drags a hand down his face. The honest answer to that question is there are no teams, if he had time or inclination he’d be equally as likely to go for one person as any other, but right now that likelihood is pretty much zero for either side. Nothing personal, but Snow on a hilltop, they just had a war. “Is there an option for tired?” he says finally. “I identify as tired.”
Later that night, Sara drives Alister back to the central station. “I swear I didn’t know about that,” she says. “I would’ve given you a warning.”
Alister shoots her a look, but she dropped the innocent face ages back and hasn’t bothered to put it back on. “Oh yeah?”
“Sure,” Sara says. “I’ll send you in unarmed, but not completely unprepared. Come on, give me some credit.”
He snorts, but really, he’d never have survived the Peacekeeping Academy if he couldn’t handle a little teasing. And now he’s met the Victors, and life in the districts might have soured him of any childhood hero worship tendencies but that’s still not something you get to do every day.
He watches Sara drive, at ease despite the too-high seat pulled all the way forward. “Whose truck is this?” Alister asks.
“It’s Lyme’s,” Sara says, not taking her eyes from the road. Makes sense - last thing they need this time of night is to hit a deer and bring a Victor’s truck back with a huge dent in it - but Alister wonders if there’s more to it, if she remembers late nights with the headlights off and landmines in the back of the truck, the train’s whistle a distant deadline.
If anything cements Sara’s place in Rokia’s life it’s this. Alister doesn’t know Lyme from limestone but he knows trucks, and he’ll bet she wouldn’t lend hers out to just anybody. For Sara to get to drive it without a full lecture there and back on taking care of the baby, she must have carved a place in the trusted circle something good. Huh.
“Thanks for tonight,” Alister says. “It was good to get out, see people.”
“Good, now you just need to keep doing it.” Sara’s teeth flash in a grin. “We should meet up again, next time we’re in the same district, yeah?”
Alister has terrible moonshine stirring a protest in his stomach, half a dozen embarrassing stories in his repertoire, and Devon’s phone number in his pocket with a brazen note he’s not going to think about. He leans back in the seat and closes his eyes, feeling the rumble of the engines through the leather. “Yeah, all right,” he says. “Sounds fun.”
“Sara,” Alister says, in a very calm, reasonable voice. He perfected that voice over years of Peacekeeping, following orders that jarred something deep inside him like splinters of bone scraping against soft tissue, and then again during the war as he found himself increasingly having to say things like no, Sara, we can’t just ‘blow it all up’ once a week. “You said we were meeting your girlfriend and her friends.”
Sara blinks at him, eyes wide and innocent, sweet snow on an avalanche, he should have seen this coming. “We are.”
Alister takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I assumed you meant her gearhead friends.”
“Oh, I’m aware.” Sara grins now, all loose limbs and shark teeth, and she leans back and hums to herself as she steers the truck down a dirt road that Alister could identify by hovercraft by the time he was a junior cadet but has never, ever so much as stepped foot on because no one ever does. “If I’d said anything you would have gotten all weird about it. This way you get about ten minutes to hyperventilate. Perfect amount of time.”
“Sara,” Alister says again, helpless. He looks down at his feet, still a good feet away from the front edge of the cab. Thinks about all the time he spent in Nine, crammed into vehicles too small for him. Thinks of Sara, hopping the inter-district trains and catching public transportation and hitching rides whenever she’s in Two. Whose truck is this? A hard scrabble starts up in his chest.
“You’ll be fine.” Sara drums the flats of her fingers on the steering wheel absently. “I’ve told them all about you, anyway. They’re all very impressed and really want to meet you.”
Alister is not a star-struck twelve-year-old with a collection of braided bands and no beads around his wrist. He is an adult with half a bloody career behind him, a rebel and war veteran and a host of other things that nowadays mostly add up to ‘tired’. He also wants to roll down the window and vomit over the side of the truck. No big deal. Instead he looks out the window at the road ahead, twisting its way through thick lines of pine, spruce, and cedar.
Part of him can’t believe it’s not a prank until Sara pulls the truck in along the tall white fence, ten feet high and completely unwelcoming from the outside. “Do they normally host a lot of parties?” he asks, unable to help himself. He knows the new regime is pushing the reunification angle, and with that comes the demystification of the Victors, but he didn’t think that meant opening the Village up as a party venue.
Sara throws the truck into park and pushes open the driver’s side door. “Rokia lives here,” she says, her voice doing a weird thing like she tried for exaggerated, put-upon patience but also for extreme casualness at the same time. Either way Alister only blinks at her. “She moved in with Lyme after the war. Or, well, once Lyme finally got her to stop living out of her garage, anyway. Been like that for a while now.”
Alister takes the walk around the side of the wall to process that one. He knew Sara had a thing with a Victor during the war, they all did, but from what he knew of the Sixes they’d been quiet and kept to themselves. Sara’s priority had been getting Rokia of the whole mess alive, and Alister’s had been making sure that didn’t interfere with the bigger picture. It didn’t, and Rokia did, and that was the end of their circles overlapping. Sara’s girl hobnobbing with the who’s who of District 2 is a whole new mess of information that Alister needs to digest quickly.
Like. Really, really quickly.
It’s fine, at first. Rokia meets them at the gate, hands curled in the hem of her sleeves, and Sara folds her in against her side and presses a kiss to her cheek and then they’re off, following the sound of laughter and general merriment. And funny enough from there it’s almost easy: Alister is a Peacekeeper, or was, and he didn’t rub elbows with Victors like the high-ranking officers but he knows how to behave around important people. He squares his shoulders, digs down deep past the war and the years of service and the Academy to the old memories of image training, and it’s not all that hard to smile and throw back banter as though his childhood heroes are just another squadron kicking loose after a long day.
(It helps that there are less of them. They’ve learned to fill the gaps now, no conspicuous empty spaces at the picnic benches or conversation circles, but the Victors lost people and they’re still finding that balance with everyone who’s left. Alister could wrap himself in a quilt stitched from squares representing the people he failed to save, and so he takes - not comfort, exactly, but a breath of understanding.)
The conversations are a weird kind of dance, skirting those things that no one talks about. The war, the fighting, who he lost. Why he turned, what pushed him over the edge, whether it was a slow drip by drip over months and years or a rushing flood all at once. Sometimes people ask. Sometimes they challenge, hostility bristling along every line of muscle. Alister rarely answers. The Victors, at least, don’t go there at all. They also - thank the mountains - don’t ask him about his bracelet or his weapons specialty back in his Centre days or any of the other things he’d feared a bunch of glory-days champions might think it fun to obsess over.
Brutus asks about his hobbies, then actually makes a disappointed dad face when Alister says it’s been a while since he’s really found the time. Adessa frowns and grills him on his eating schedule, concluding that he needs to focus more on regular protein intake and also work harder to get some fresh greens. Artemisia has a surprising wealth of knowledge about incendiaries, which she declares goes back to a checkered past as a juvenile pyromaniac, then grins and asks him not to hold it against her. “After all,” she says, “some of my best arresting officers were Peacekeepers.”
And Devon - Devon keeps watching him, eyes narrowed, like Alister is the final clue in a crossword puzzle he needs to finish before he can sleep in peace.
Eventually Brutus catches on. “I know that face. Can’t find him in your file?” He claps Devon on the shoulder, easygoing.
Devon has barely touched his moonshine. Alister took a sip when offered, then politely set it off to the side in the hopes everyone forgets about it, because what - the fuck. (He knows getting the hops production back online isn’t exactly a priority in a wartorn country, but it’s got to be better than whatever Devon’s brewing up here.) “I’ll get it,” he says, pointing a finger at Alister. “You’re not my year. I know I didn’t send you a congratulations letter after your Academy acceptance, so that means you’re older than I am. And you’re not making it easy on me, either, which is more telling than you think, but I can’t tell if that means you’re modest or embarrassed.”
Alister clears his throat. A beer would be real nice right about now, damn it. “You know this is a little scary to watch.”
“See, embarrassed might lead me to say we hooked up, except there’s no reason for that to be a reason for shame, we’re all adults and I’m amazing,” Devon continues, even as Brutus rolls his eyes and Sara snickers. “So that means -” He stops dead.
Alister lets out a long, slow breath and tries very hard not to think about flinging himself into the nearest lake - too far of a walk, if he remembers the topographic maps with any accuracy. “I’ve never met a Victor in my life,” he says, with all the desperation he can muster. Pretend it’s a hostage situation and the lives of fifty people depend on his ability to stay calm, composed, professional. There’s someone standing on a tripped landmine and they need him to walk them through how to jimmy the wire.
Devon’s grin spreads across his face like a splash of wine on a white dress uniform, inevitable and damning. “No you haven’t have you.” He sits back and clinks the leg of his cane against his ankle in a gesture of satisfaction. “We go way back.”
“Babe, what the hell are you -” Artemisia starts, but then understanding hits and confusion morphs into a gleeful grin. “Wait, really? Oh this is a first, it’s like a unicorn!”
A few of the Victors still look blank, but Petra lets out a wild laugh that she tries to hide by sputtering into her water, and Lyme pinches the bridge of her nose and gets up to make a conspicuous check of the game meat Brutus is grilling. Sara, meanwhile, looks back and forth from Devon to Alister, forehead scrunched. “Hey, does someone want to clue the rest of us into the little inside joke you’re all enjoying here?”
Devon glances at Sara, then Alister, and a flicker of guilt crosses his face. The Village plays by its own rules, a clear hierarchy and social understanding, who gets to tease whom with the safety of that structure around them. Alister and Sara have their own relationship, their own command structure from the war that they’re still navigating in peacetime now as allies and ex-colleagues and maybe friends. Who knows how this will affect it. Alister sees the calculation pass over Devon’s face, and under cover of Misha’s shoulder he waves his hand and flicks his fingers in a question: should I let it go?
It’s very tempting. But they’re all watching now, and Alister didn’t pull friends from the mud in pieces to be a coward over a little joking. “You brought it up, not me,” he says, reaching for his drink again. “Just remember that. I’m not the one running around flaunting it for attention.”
Artemisia is more perceptive than she looks, because she catches whatever passes between Alister and Devon and absorbs it without a word. She turns to Sara and Rokia and favours them with a sharp grin. “Devon and Alister were Centre boyfriends.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Brutus says over the barbecue. “What happens at the Centre stays at the Centre.”
Sara flings up her hands. “I like how this is supposed to explain things but now I’m even more confused.”
Artemisia takes pity on her and gives an impressively ethnographic explanation of Centre culture, though she spices it up with a few salacious anecdotes that make Sara’s eyebrows creep up her forehead and Rokia decide Lyme needs help grilling the vegetables. “Devon and Petra hold the record for the Village,” Artemisia finishes. “Male and female, respectively. Petra took out her whole year, minus one - and she got that one retroactively, so there’s debate on whether she made a clean sweep-”
“Oh my god,” Petra mutters, her face flaming red.
“- and Devon got most of his year plus a handful on either side.”
Sara looks over at Alister, understanding dawning. “Including you.”
Alister groans. “I was on my way out. I knew I’d be getting the Peacekeeper transfer soon, and it’s what I wanted but I was still itchy about it. Even if you don’t want to make it to the end, you almost want to fight it when they cut you. I’d played it safe, followed the rules. Devon offered. I figured, why not.”
“You must have been a good time,” Devon says meditatively. Alister chokes on his mouthful of paint thinner but Devon continues with either true blitheness or a masterful impression of it. “What? I don’t remember the good ones, those all blur together. I remember the bad ones.”
“Wow,” Alister says, the same time as Brutus drawls, “Sure glad we get to share this moment together.”
Artemisia only grins wider. “How about now? My Centre phase stuck, same with Devon and Petra. Brutus and Lyme kicked theirs. Did you switch teams?”
Alister drags a hand down his face. The honest answer to that question is there are no teams, if he had time or inclination he’d be equally as likely to go for one person as any other, but right now that likelihood is pretty much zero for either side. Nothing personal, but Snow on a hilltop, they just had a war. “Is there an option for tired?” he says finally. “I identify as tired.”
Later that night, Sara drives Alister back to the central station. “I swear I didn’t know about that,” she says. “I would’ve given you a warning.”
Alister shoots her a look, but she dropped the innocent face ages back and hasn’t bothered to put it back on. “Oh yeah?”
“Sure,” Sara says. “I’ll send you in unarmed, but not completely unprepared. Come on, give me some credit.”
He snorts, but really, he’d never have survived the Peacekeeping Academy if he couldn’t handle a little teasing. And now he’s met the Victors, and life in the districts might have soured him of any childhood hero worship tendencies but that’s still not something you get to do every day.
He watches Sara drive, at ease despite the too-high seat pulled all the way forward. “Whose truck is this?” Alister asks.
“It’s Lyme’s,” Sara says, not taking her eyes from the road. Makes sense - last thing they need this time of night is to hit a deer and bring a Victor’s truck back with a huge dent in it - but Alister wonders if there’s more to it, if she remembers late nights with the headlights off and landmines in the back of the truck, the train’s whistle a distant deadline.
If anything cements Sara’s place in Rokia’s life it’s this. Alister doesn’t know Lyme from limestone but he knows trucks, and he’ll bet she wouldn’t lend hers out to just anybody. For Sara to get to drive it without a full lecture there and back on taking care of the baby, she must have carved a place in the trusted circle something good. Huh.
“Thanks for tonight,” Alister says. “It was good to get out, see people.”
“Good, now you just need to keep doing it.” Sara’s teeth flash in a grin. “We should meet up again, next time we’re in the same district, yeah?”
Alister has terrible moonshine stirring a protest in his stomach, half a dozen embarrassing stories in his repertoire, and Devon’s phone number in his pocket with a brazen note he’s not going to think about. He leans back in the seat and closes his eyes, feeling the rumble of the engines through the leather. “Yeah, all right,” he says. “Sounds fun.”