Chapter Text
The flag looks like a small flame guttering tiny on the slim, flared shape of the tower.
Mom's hair fuzzes around her face like crimson lightning. Her cheeks are red. Blossoms, Ma used to say. To Jack Jack, they appear like the sharp ends of Cazador asses. Angry, stung.
Ma has her big, gold coin tethered around her neck. She calls it her lucky penny, for better or worse, usually with that weird gargle laugh that sounds as if she is crying,
"This is prime cargo!" She sticks a finger into the leather-plated chest of the checking guard. He creaks his cattle whip with his fist. All fire, no smoke, as Raul would say. He was always saying weird stuff like that. Boone the brahmin rattles with the bottles, as if in protest.
That name was another joke. Raul had said Boone was an angry man with a killer shot and a broken heart. Jack had asked why they had called the brahmin "Boone." Raul had dryly murmured "affection." Ma said something fancy, like "alliteration."
Raul isn't around to explain that anymore. He and Ma had a fight. It was a bad one, one of those late at night squabbles with the fire making them look red and angry. He'd left after that. Ma had said he had asked for something for he had no right to.
Jack Jack wasn't sure about that but had spent the rest of their ramble to Vegas slowly building tears and dried snot on his sleeve. No point running to Ma - her face had that tight, shiny look like a balloon ready to pop.
Chance watches Ma coolly. He watches everyone as if he has a chill built up in his bones. Acne scars and pockmarks stick out of his brown skin like moon craters. He doesn't say much, just keeps looking at Ma all strange like. He thought it was the way men usually look at Ma, but it is as if Chance is putting a picture over Ma's face and taking it back down again, like those trick papers prewar where you have to focus to see the pattern or some shit like that.
Ma's voice is getting louder. The men in red are combing through the wagon, emptying bottles of thin, stinking amber onto the ground. The fumes make his eyes water. Ma's eyes ball in her head, crazy-like, and any red skirt slur she is gonna toss is eaten up by a violent choking cough. She doubles up, and Jack-Jack springs to thump her back as he saw Raul did before, only with his voice all low and quiet as if he were one of Ma's boyfriends.
"It's good cargo!" Jack Jack raises his own voice. Not too much, Ma has warned him about the boys in red, to keep himself small - they steal boys like you, Jack Jack - but loud enough to prove himself a man. "You can sell it for good money! Improve the economy!"
Someday, someone will tell him what that is.
The men ignore him. They look at the cargo, then back at Ma's lucky penny, and back again.
Chase steps forward. He's been doing that a lot recently.
"Fine," he says in his quiet voice, all low like the purring kitten from the last motel. "But we get paid a premium for our loss. Mrs Cassidy is one of the untouchables."
Ma wobbles back to Boone, bracing her palms against the thick body. Jack Jack abandons Chance to push lightly on her back. He wants to get close to her - this is as much touch as she tolerates right now. She's raw, she says. She's tired. Her rosy cheeks are yellow underneath, and no man looks at her anymore.
Chance's shadow falls over them both.
"They'll compensate for the loss of the liquor," he says, purring again like the engines Jack has never heard. Ma says she heard one, once. "As long as we don't bring contraband into their territory again."
Cass heaves into her hands, chuckling through the yellowish froth that trickles from her lips and between her fingers.
"Ma," Jack Jack tries to swipe at her mouth with his sleeve. "You're dribbling, Ma."
"Even this..." She pulls Jack inside her left armpit, fussing his hair. Gesturing at a passive Chance, she smacks her lucky coin. "...has its limits, right?"
The sun slices the desert into harsh, angled rectangles. The penthouse has a circular window that grips the bloom of the outer tower and knuckles it into place. Like a great glass hand that has split concrete and plaster like skin.
Vulpes taps his nails on the glass, watching his breath flower on the plexiglass. The figure in the opposing bed shifts.
“Careful,” It drawls. “Lean too far out and you might fall, love.”
Vulpes laughs. Since the felling of Vegas, he has found himself and his duties depleted. There had been the initial rush – the culling of the outside tribes, the scythe that ran through the outer barracks that circled the walls of Vegas. Westside, Freeside, the paltry Northside houses tiny and burrowed like mouse holes.
The Kings had fought, so their skin and skulls – some still slimy with hair gel – had been stamped along the pathway to the North Gate. The cave-dwelling cannibals offered via consequence rather than choice Caesar their establishment. The Slitherkin were flayed for such disloyalty to any cause but themselves, with a choice few assimilated as slavers (they did have a certain flair, regardless.)
As for the Bootriders, the courier had pleaded a spat of mercy for their bravery, and so few were sent out hobbling into the desert they had abandoned for profligate pleasures.
After that, the concept of his own personal pleasures seemed alien to Vulpes as mutfruit to cazadors, but perhaps after such toils, there was a place to allow rest for the worthy.
Notably, himself, for Caesar had awarded him most gracefully for his service, and notably, awarded him to Sextus, courier and conqueror.
It is not exactly what Vulpes would know as “love” – but he would now freely allow his frustrations and admirations to swell in his chest upon notice of his beloved until the former emotion burned away completely.
“I know my limits, beloved.” He replies. “More than you may be aware.”
“Well, yes,” Sextus stretches his arms out of the bed. Muscular strips of Mojave meat, dotted with sunbursts across the flesh. Freckles are an anomaly, flaming hair rare. The man who rolls from their mutual bed is rarer still. “Well, we certainly pushed them last night, didn’t we?”
Vulpes allows Arthur’s embrace. Kissing, intimacy, the leads which emigrate to sex. These singular rituals, tests and teases of skin, that culmination which he understood to be an abomination except when purified, endorsed, in the eyes of his emperor.
“So,” he utters coolly. He knows that Arthur realises his coyness is part of his way to pursue his wishes, as is the calculated surrender of body and time, but he knows that Arthur knows this, so surely it places him at an advantage. “I trust you wish to try these limits – that if as if our plans are unchanged, that is.”
Arthur crinkles his eyes, indulgent. The familiar frustration returns, but Vulpes is patient. He wishes for Arthur to shed that mysterious arrogance he mistakes for allure. It is a classic tactic, employed by slaves and lowly soldiers and women. If one cannot be free, then the mystery is the shield for which you foolishly believe you can keep a part of yourself.
This is no longer necessary, for Arthur has now become Sextus, and he has Vulpes, now, to keep those places that bring him doubt, that buy him indulgence.
“Of course,” he says. He brushes past Vulpes to lean against the glass, tapping his fingers over the streams of red that bleed out over their land like a river. The Legion roads, spilt out over, moulding the sands to their design. “It’s just a lot to think about, love.”
“Perhaps,” Vulpes agrees. “But I trust you will think about it. Time has a habit of getting away from lesser men. I’m sure you will not disappoint.”
Arthur chuckles.
“Screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.”
Vulpes raises an eyebrow.
“A saying from a past tribe?”
“No. A poet.”
“Ah.” Vulpes smirks, amused. He places his palms on Arthur’s head, pulling out the hair, curling it around his fingers. “Yes. Your weapons have always been your words. One of the first things I noticed about you. One of the first things that drew my apprehension, and now…”
He drops his voice, lowers his lashes. What once had been an act to entice the foolish now is heavy with his own relish, his own feeling.
“…my admiration,” he finishes, finally. “But I believe you know that.”
The light of the outside world moves across Arthur’s face. He grabs Vulpes, kisses him, sliding his thumbs to push inside his cheeks. Arthur’s kisses are always desperate as if it is the last time he shall ever have one, and that amuses Vulpes, for what power he has and what foolishness Arthur has in the belief Vulpes would ever let him go.
Arthur’s affection requires adjustment. The pressure of his body against his in the smaller hours, the trap of legs and containment of locked arms. Vulpes, for all his beauty, has not indulged carnal touch. Legion men sleep stacked on each other like cattle, the sinew and pulse of strained muscle and sand rough skin common sensations. Only when he had achieved his promotion was, he gifted his own tent, his own personal share of the slaves who could draw baths and arrange sheets.
How he had pitied those who entertained women per hour or occasionally each other. He can now admit his preferences for the latter, but such primal acts would dull sense and waste time, and a death of purpose for no child would appear after.
To become Sextus’s beloved – his, alone – he had found acceptable. Caesar is paramount, but time and victory has provided quieter times, an opportunity to hive off crudely anointed “love” for himself.
However, that time may pass, for their work – he, and Sextus’s – are not yet done.
For Lanius still lives.
They meet the strangers before they reach Freeside, cos Ma is too sick to continue, and Chance says they are charitable types. One is a doctor – not that doctor – because he is too old and has black hair pleated down his back. He wears a Follower’s coat though. He’d been too busy with Ma to ask any questions.
There’s four men, travelling. One, the doctor. Two, a cheerful man with blood on his cheeks and feathers in his cap. Third, a nomad who keeps talking to Ma with an eyepatch and hair grown over the tattoos on his skull. Fourth, a man in snakeskin shoes and belt, who has a voice that makes Jack Jack’s hair stand on end.
The strange man with the feathered cap and painted combat armour is chatting animatedly to Chance. He has this big guitar he keeps trying to pluck and he thinks Chance’s quiet means he likes it. When he’d played earlier, the snakeskin man had sung. A song about rivers and salvation, then a song about chalk and blood.
The doctor’s shadow slices Ma’s face from view. She’s stretched out across the stones, her breathing shallow. The eyepatch man is feeding Boone the brahmin some yucca fruit, the green and yellow pulp dribbling down over her maw.
The snakeskin man is sat by the fire on a downed tree, his forefingers pressed under his chin. A torn rag is tied across his face, just under the eyes, the skin across his brow and exposed cheek chewed like minced cram.
He’s tall and weird and dressed like a sheriff he saw in a comic book once. He’s got this book he keeps open, right next to his gun. His singing had been rough and ugly, but nobody told him to stop.
The fire is big, making all of them long, dancing, dark shapes. Jack Jack can’t look back at Ma. He decides instead he’ll try and look at the man with the mince face, only to see the eyes – cold and blue – turn slowly to him.
“You have questions,” he says. It’s not like how people usually speak to him. It’s a gentle challenge. Sometimes the people who don’t know how to speak to kids can speak to them best. No bullshit. “Come and sit beside me. Ask me your questions.”
“Hm.” Jack Jack sits at the end of the log, chewing his thumbnail. The man leans his head back. The wind flutters the rag and shows lips, skin all twisted and teeth just visible. Jack Jack swallows. “Okay. Why do you look like that?”
The man laughs.
“What’s your name?”
“You should answer my question first.”
“I earned it.” He replies, cold. “This is the result of my nature. Of what my anger, my failure to connect with God, with all that I love. Now that my outer appearance reflects my past, I must now endeavour to change the interior, to make amends for all that I have done.”
Jack Jack blinks.
“My name’s Jack Jack,” he says. “And I don’t know what that means. Ma said Caesar did it.”
The man hums to himself, thoughtful.
“He did.” He nods. “As did I. You can call me Joshua, Jack. It is good to meet friends on the road.”
Jack Jack looks up at him, fully. Up close, he isn’t really that scary. He walked with Raul who looked like a zombie, who told him all the stories about Joshua Graham and Caesar and the red skirt boys that now controlled the tall lighted buildings in the distance.
Jack Jack counts all the points in his head. Connects them like the thin lines on their old maps.
“Are you going to kill the courier?”
He should say Caesar. But he doesn’t. Ma doesn’t care about Caesar.
“No.” He shakes his head. “I am here to save him.”
Jack Jack blinks.
“What? Why?”
Joshua reaches for his mask, removes it. Jack Jack winces. The firelight creeps into all the eaten dips in his cheek and brow, but his eyes glitter back at him.
“We all venture through periods of darkness,” he says. “But in my darkest time, he came to me and brought me away from what would have destroyed me, and those I seek to defend. He does not know that the Lord sent him to shield me from my nature, and now, I shall shield him from what world he has found himself in.”
Jack Jack pokes the fire. Ma is choking. The doctor is speaking to her gently. Boone moos through her yucca fruit. Chance has shifted away from the “musician” to sit beside Ma.
“What if he likes that world?” Jack Jack mutters. He pulls back his hood and shows his hair, red like Ma’s and Arthur’s. “What if he wanted it? Chose it?”
“No.” Joshua replies, calm. “I do not believe that of him. I have faith in Arthur, and I shall bring that faith to him.”
“Jack Jack?” The log creaks. The doctor – soft in the face and hands – smiles at Jack Jack. He has the kind of face that makes Jack Jack wanna cry. It’s kind but there’s no pity. “Your mother is asking for you.”
“Is she gonna be okay?” Jack Jack grabs his coat, curling it up into his fist. “She’s gonna be okay, right?”
The doctor’s eyes crease at the corners.
“She is now,” he says. “But you need to get to a camp where they practice the kind of medicine that can give her the care she requires.”
Jack Jack sniffs.
“We can’t,” His head begins to droop to his knees. He doesn’t know why now he cries – between Joshua and this doctor who smells like sweet brandy and herbs – but tears are rolling off his nose, into the sand. “Ma won’t. And medicine is banned. Your kind of medicine, anyway.”
“Don’t worry,” The doctor goes on one knee. Jack Jack pushes his face into his chest, trying to curb his wail. “We’ll help you as much as we can, I promise.”
Maybe people who can talk to kids are not bullshit. Not Bill, because that’s the name that drifts, soft, from Joshua’s skinned lips, as Jack Jack disappears into him for what seems like ions, until he plucks himself free, wiping snot across his cheek and Bill taking out a clean rag and chasing his face with it, like a mother.
Not like Ma.
He waddles over to Ma. Bill has taken his seat beside Joshua, so close it looks like they are stitched together. Joshua has taken his hand. Bill squeezes it back, lying his head on his shoulder. Bill isn’t afraid. Arthur wasn’t either. So, he guesses he won’t be.
Ma is propped back against Boone, who has bent her knees to support Ma’s weight. Chance is on one side, the one-eyed man on the other. Jack Jack drops down, curls up to her to duck under her arm. She breathes out, clean and slow, not thick and shaking.
“Ma,” Jack Jack burbles into her armpit. They are both focused, lazily, on the figures sat together by the fire. The feathered cap man has joined them, sat by Bill’s knee. “Did you and the courier love each other like that?”
Ma doesn’t laugh this time. She cries instead, looking toward the lights, toward the tower.