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Freshman year
Recruitment – Part 1

“You all are here to row. You lot were recruited for this because you were hot s**t in high school. Some of you hold erg records. That’s all fine and good, but to have the best crew, we need to have the best people, regardless of experience, and your job this week is to keep an eye out for talent. You see someone who could row? You bring them to tryouts next week. Got that? Alright, see you tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

The crowd of young men broke and went their separates, hefting up duffel bags, discarding wet shirts, pulling on sweat pants. The freshmen, still slowly growing accustomed to each other, shuffled out of the boathouse toward the mess hall, team mates but not quite friends yet. They had yet to establish boat hierarchy or group dynamic, and they wandered as a tentative cluster, potential friends.

“Who-a. What’s in there? Another dining hall?” An unfamiliar face approached them, all easy smiles and approachability. He could have been one of them, tall as he was and strong.

“Crew mess hall,” someone said.

“Ohh, right. You guys basically just live out here, don’t you?” The boy said, peering at them. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen in the water?”

“Computer.”

“No way,” said the boy. “You fish it out, or what?”

“Nah, we were a bit busy rowing.” A collective group laugh.

“You ever think about rowing?” Rylan spoke up. “You’d probably be good.”

“Me?” the boy said, and this time it was his turn to laugh. He threw his head back with an almost wolfish bark of laughter. “You guys wake up at five to train, right? You couldn’t pay me to do what you do.”

Some of the boys shrugged.

Shame.

Freshman year
He’s good

“You thought Stark was gonna fly and die, huh?”

“Come on,” Rylan said, watching Casimir’s erg with critical eyes. “The guy’s doing it for money that the university’s never going to give him just for rowing. It’s going to start hurting and he’s going to quit.”

“Hundred burpees says you’re wrong.”

“You got it”

They stared as Casimir’s still-untrained body went back and forth on the erg. He didn’t have as much control as he needed yet to really be able to apply power with the legs. He rushed a little. The stroke wasn’t fluid.

Yet for all his technical deficiencies, the numbers that came up on the screen every time he pushed down with the legs and brought the handle flying toward his torso were solid. They watched as he held his average 500 meter split at a 1:34, on pace to finish his 2000 meter test in under 6:20.

He was flying – then, 500 meters to go, and suddenly his stroke hitched. The split came up and kept creeping as fatigue began to show in his arms and legs.

“A hundred burpees, you said?” Rylan said, cocking his brow and glancing sidelong at his teammates.

“You called it.” A laugh. “Still, his first 2k after two weeks on the erg, a 6:29.8? You better watch out, Ry. He’s gunning for your seat in the A boat.”

Rylan’s trademark grin, easygoing as ever, lit his face. “******** off.”

Freshman year
Drinking

Ten p.m. Just about bedtime for tired rowers who had to wake up at 5 in the morning for practice. As Rylan readied himself for bed, his phone buzzed with the weight of a group text sent to all the freshman rowers.



Rylan stared at the message and others as they came buzzing through.







Finally,



Without so much as a pause,













In his dorm room, Rylan let out a low growl. Frustration tightened every muscle in his body. That kid. That kid was irresponsible. His fingers hovered over the keys on his phone, wondering if the text he’d composed was worth sending.

Sophomore year
Acid trip – Part 1

Rylan was woken up by a blaring alarm at 5 a.m. for practice one morning, and in his head, that alarm was the sound of the doomsday clock finally hitting midnight. He bolted upright, flinging his comforter clear across the room to distract his “enemies,” and grabbed his pillow to run out the door.

“JESUS CHRIST!”

The voice that came out from under the comforter jolted him to a stop, and he turned with eyes wide and let out a quiet “haaaaaahh…” as he wielded the pillow weapon-like before him, ready to take on an assault.

“What the actual ********, Ry?” Cas Stark emerged and dumped the comforter on the ground, staring out at him under knitted eyebrows as if Rylan was an alien he was meeting for the first time.

“Drop the weapon, okay, I know! I KNOW, DAMN IT,” Rylan barked, brandishing the pillow like a floppy broadsword.

“I’m not holding a weapon, dude. You’re driving to practice today,” Cas said, batting the pillow aside.

“STOP CHASING ME OKAY!”

“Ry, what the f- are you high?” That was rhetorical. Cas could tell by now, once the initial confusion had worn off, that Rylan was high as a kite and no amount of talk was going to convince him that he was not, in fact, being chased by secret agents of a nameless organization. “Jesus, Ry, what did she do to you?”

She being the girl Rylan had been hooking up with lately, who had quickly proven herself more trouble than she was worth. Cas was not alone in thinking this, but nobody had gotten around to telling Rylan yet that this girl he was so taken with was bad news.

“Did you drop acid? Ry, you know they can kick you off the team for that,” Cas hissed, fending off the pillow that had come at him with all the ferocity of a soft battering ram. He lifted an arm above his head like a shield as Rylan rained down blows on him like his life depended on it. “No, ********… stop it. SIT DOWN!” He ripped the pillow away and shoved Rylan back onto the bed, then turned and to rummage through the nightstand, shoving a box of condoms and other unmentionables out of the way.

“Where are those fluffy handcuffs you got from the white elephant party last year?” He asked. “Ry, where are the- Oh, forget it.”

He reached and flipped on the lamp on the nightstand, much to Rylan’s dismay, and went through the drawers until he fished out the aforementioned fuzzy handcuffs, buried deep in the back of the lowest drawer.

“Jeez, you’ll drop acid with a chick before letting her handcuff you? Priorities, man,” Cas said, shaking his head as his usual smirk began to return to his face, now that he’d had a moment to take stock of the situation. Rylan came from a much more idyllic home than Cas had, which meant he approached a lot of things like sex and drugs with wide-eyed wonder. Not necessarily a bad thing, but then… things like this happened.

Cas reached for Rylan’s arm and slapped one end of the handcuffs on. He pulled him over to the front of the bed and tightened the other around the post of the headboard. “Alright, bud, stay put,” he said, grinning as Rylan let out a defeated “nooooo…..”

“Listen to me. Seriously. Do not leave this room, alright? I’m taking the keys to those and to your car. I’ll drive the boys to practice, and… are you listening?” He gave Rylan a not-too-light smack across the face. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

But Rylan was listening to something else. Cas shook his head again, and scrawled a note on a page out of Rylan’s notebook, which he tore out and taped to the wall beside him.

“Read that if you come off your high before I’m back,” he said, snagging the keys to the cuffs and to Rylan’s truck. “DO NOT GO ANYWHERE.”

He turned to leave, throwing one last glance over his shoulder. Silly, silly boy.

Sophomore year
Life in the house – Part 1

The house had spoken. The residents of the “Tortuga” crew house had decreed that, as Cas’ pair partner and the one closest to him, Rylan ought to be the one to address the issues they’d been having lately.

“So, Cas, you know those dishes you have sitting next to the upstairs sink?”

“Oh, yea, I’ll get to those this afternoon,” Cas replied, tilting his head back from where he lounged on the couch to look at Rylan upside down. He’d spread out a textbook and a notebook full of scribbled notes that, truth be told, even he couldn’t read sometimes, and was busy puzzling through a problem set.

“Right, that’s the thing, you said that yesterday. And the laundry on the drying racks downstairs?”

“I’ll grab those when I—”

“Yea, you said that the day before.”

“Oh.”

Rylan picked his way over to the couch and dropped himself on the far side, splaying across the seat cushion. “Here’s the thing. The guys are getting a little annoyed by the way your stuff just seems to dominate all surfaces in this house. It’s getting out of hand, you can’t just leave your s**t lying around everywhere. There are five other people living in this house.

And, before you say anything, just look at what you’ve done here,” he added, gesturing to the coffee table and armchair beside them. Cas’ notes and books lay strewn all over them, half of them completely unrelated to the work he was doing right now.

“Yea, sorry, I’m just not used to—”

“Not used to living with other people who care, I know,” Rylan said with a small smile, eyeing Cas with a watchful eye. He knew this routine, and he wasn’t prepared to let Cas get away with throwing out an excuse and not owning up to his bad habits. “It’s never too late to learn, Cas. You can’t live your entire life without knowing how to live with other people. I don’t care if you’ve never done it before, you’re doing it now. Get it together.”

Cas eyed him a little sullenly, but he said nothing in response.

“By which I mean, go pick up your laundry and do the dishes,” Rylan prodded. “Now, before you forget. Remember what coach says? Make the change – and keep it.”

Cas stood up slowly with a sigh. “You drive my nuts, grandpa,” he said. But he went and did it anyway.

(Trigger warning: abuse)

Sophomore year
Journey: Black Springs Ranch

There was a place, 90 minutes north of Spokane, called the Black Springs Ranch. It was a mid-sized operation that hired on mostly seasonal workers to help with birthing, brand the calves, and drive the cattle to and from their grazing grounds in the spring and winter. A lot of the men who came through were the seedy sort who liked to lose themselves amid the barely-charted, unregulated nothingness that was rural Washington. They swept through ranches like Black Springs, year after year, aimless and wandering with nothing to hold themselves accountable to except for themselves.

In a good place, with a good lot, that made for friendships and stories to pass around the dinner table. At Black Springs, it made for a gathering place of bitter and unfriendly men.

It was at Black Springs that Cas spent many a spring and summer in his childhood, brought by a father who, by definition, was every bit as seedy as the rest of them. There were other ranches in Washington, but the man fit in nowhere but there. He returned at the turn of every spring with his two children in tow, the burdensome result of a brief marriage than ended when his wife overdosed on painkillers when their daughter was two.

It was at Black Springs that Cas learned about the dark side of men, the side that pushed and shoved and kicked a young boy until he fell and cut his head against the corner of a dresser, that locked him out of his family’s room to “play” with his younger sister while he pounded his fists on the door and yelled until he was hoarse, that saw his father do nothing in the face of all these transgressions. From spring to summer every year, Cas forgot what his own face looked like when it didn’t have a bruise or two.

It was also at Black Springs that Cas learned, on his own, what it meant to grow up. He was 16 that year, already 6’3” and lean after years of working the horses, wrangling cattle, hefting bale after bale of hay. That year, he had enough.

May, barely two months into the season start. He’d already lost count of the number of times they’d tried to bully him out of the room so nobody could see them bother Irena. Tried, and failed, and every time they failed, Cas feared them less. Then that day, behind the barn, when he watched a man round the corner with his dirt-encrusted hands around Irena’s pale, trembling arm, pulling her away. The man caught his eye, like he was daring Cas to do something about it. So he did.

He flew at the man with rage befitting a bull, tackled him into the ground and sat on him while he pummeled the man’s face and neck with fists that had been waiting ten years to do just that. And when he was done, he reached for an old horseshoe and kept on beating until the man’s face was nothing but crushed bones and blood under his own bruised and bloodied knuckles.

Ten years, they frequented that ranch, spending more time there than any other place. It was more like a “home” to them than any house they’d ever stayed in. Ten years too many.

They were thrown off the ranch that year. The next month, their father was gone, vanished without so much as a note or a dollar left behind.

And Cas was glad.

Sophomore year
Journey: Truths uncovered

Cas had stopped looking at the map directions for 20 minutes, having come down this road so many times. As he swung the car onto the dirt road that led to a fence and a wooden sign embossed with the words Black Springs Ranch, he let the car roll to a stop and pulled it into first gear, letting it idle while he stared at the land that lay beyond.

“It looks…” Rylan began.

“It looks like a shithole,” Cas responded firmly, cutting him off. He slid both his hands to the top of the steering wheel and leaned his forehead against his knuckles. What was this feeling? Fear. It was palpable, like a bitter taste in his mouth that he’d suffered for a decade. This time, he was back voluntarily, and he’d never thought he’d live to see the day.

“Hey. She won’t be here. And if she is, we’ll pull her out,” Rylan said, clapping a hand onto Cas’ shoulder and squeezing reassuringly.

“That’s the thing… what if she doesn’t want to leave?” Cas said without lifting his head, and Rylan could tell that was truly his biggest fear. “What if I find her, and I know there are better things out there, but she doesn’t and she won’t come with us?” They couldn’t very well kidnap her, even if it was for her own good.

“Cas, she’s not here. Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Cas took a breath and straightened up, letting the car roll forward again, under and past the Black Springs sign. He guided the car down the dusty path until a barn came into sight, and beyond that, the old wooden structure that served as bunks for the cowboys. He muttered something under his breath, swinging the car toward the bunkhouse.

They pulled to a stop with a gentle plume of dust rising around the tires. This late in the day, the men were probably slowly trickling back from a long, hard day of work. When Cas strode up to the porch and shoved the front door open, there was nobody inside.

“Cas, shouldn’t we wait?”

“For what?” Cas answered, walking into the house, all arrogance and barely-suppressed rage. If he could have burned the place down, he would have.

He shoved open every closed door he could find, peering into the dusty, empty rooms with trepidation that he couldn’t show for all the anger that simmered above it. And with every room, he felt a little less scared. A little more angry.

“You’ve got a nerve, showin up here agin,” a low, threatening voice rasped from the doorway. “Breakin in. Always bin a criminal, ain’t you, you little rat. Yer father was right, he said you n that little wench sister of yours’d never amount to anything.”

Cas and Rylan turned together. A wiry, dangerous-looking man filled the open door frame.

“You,” Cas growled, moving toward him like a cat, coiled and ready to strike. Rylan lifted a hand to stop him, but he brushed it out of the way.

“Ah, you better listen to yer friend, little rat,” the man said with a derisive smirk. “Best not chase after the cat. You won’t know what hit you.”

“You can’t scare me.”

“No? How about your pretty sister? You got her hid in the trunk for us? We don’t take gifts untied.”

Cas lunged for the man, catching him around the midsection and driving him backward out the door, onto the porch and into a post. The man hit it with a resounding thud, his hat cocking sideways on his head as he wrapped his arms around Cas tried to throw him off. A knee came up and caught Cas in the stomach, drawing another loud growl of anger from him as he pushed the man back and let go, straightening back up, fists lifted, glaring at the man.

They danced that way, like snakes ready to strike, and then Cas threw a punch at the man’s face while he retaliated with an underhand jab to Cas’ chest. And then they were both on the ground, kicking up dust, scrabbling to land blows.

Rylan charged out of the house and reached into the fray, ripping the man off the ground. But one second, he was yanking the nameless man back, and the next he felt an arm go around his neck in a chokehold and another arm flew at him, colliding into the side of his head and sending sparks shooting through his vision.

Jesus, he thought. This was like middle school all over again.

Except this time, Rylan was not five and a half feet tall and scrawny. He grabbed the arm around his neck with both hands and threw his weight forward, bringing the man clear over his shoulder and slamming him bodily into the ground. Arms up to his face caught a second punch just in time, and then he was kicking out with his legs to catch his assailant in the knees.

Behind him, Cas still fought with the first man they’d seen, trading blows until Cas lost his patience once again and threw himself at the man. He tackled the guy, straddled him, rained down blows on his head again and again and he felt almost like he was 16 again, beating in a man’s face with his hands and an old horseshoe.

It wasn’t until Rylan grabbed him, and lifted him up that he stopped. He didn’t pause to look at the other two men, bloodied and staggering. Didn’t glance at Rylan, almost doubled over holding his ribs. He just stumbled to the car and yanked the door open.

By the time they passed under the Black Springs sign again, they were both feeling it. Rylan pulled down the mirror to peer at the bruises already starting to purple next to his eye.

“At least Irena wasn’t there,” he said finally. “You alright?”

Cas nodded. “Being back there, hearing all their voices. Made me feel like I was a kid again,” he said quietly. “Like I was going to shrink and they’d have… I don’t know. Power over me again.”

“They don’t, though. You know that.”

Cas nodded again. “I do now.”