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LT. SOLO #1 (907 words)


Charonite had been unfair when he said that Khaldun failed to get him any star seeds. Khaldun did get star seeds. Not often. But every once in a while, something would happen...

Khaldun had been running a small blackmailing scheme at Hillworth for as long as he could remember. There was no money for him any other way. The things some people did were pretty horrible, so there was some justification for having his silence bought, at least. Every time, it might be a little more money. If someone was really loaded, they could buy Khaldun off entirely and have their incriminating evidence back. He was easygoing. But it had been a very bad week for Khaldun this week.

This was the appointed time and place. Jeremy Barnes didn't know who his blackmailer was. Every so often, he'd get one of those ridiculous PAY UP notes made out of magazine-cutout letters, slipped under his dorm room door or into his locker. He just had to put his money in the appointed place at the appointed time, and his secret stayed secret for the next while, long or short. The blackmailer was never satisfied for long. But Jeremy was fed up. He had the money, all of it. This ended tonight.

The schoolboy waited about fifteen minutes before he saw any signs of the elusive blackmailer. It was dark out, and the other boy blended in well with the shadows of the trees, enough that his face and hair were unable to be made out. The blackmailer had a ridiculous getup on. A black button-up shirt, black jacket, black pants, black boots, all with a few splashes of color too hard to decipher. Only a bright yellow sash around the waist stood out in the dismal light. That, and a very quiet but distinctive ticking sound.

"Look, man, I have the money. I don't want any trouble. You win, ok?" Jeremy proffered a small wad of cash, ten times what he paid any of the other times. "Just give me the pictures."

"Jeremy Barnes," Lt. Hematite stated with all the emotional quality of a praying mantis, looking down at the pair of blurry photographs. His sources were, as always, classified. Sometimes even other blackmail victims. A year was a lot of time for people to make regrettable mistakes. "Cheated on an exam. Stole the teacher’s copy, got an A+, and made the dean’s list. No, really, it’s very impressive. But what’s more impressive is that you bragged about it afterward. Didn’t you want to keep it a secret?"

Now why the hell did that voice sound so familiar to Jeremy? Probably some kid from one of his classes, he never kept track of who was who unless they were near the top of the class like himself. “******** you, I’m paying up like you wanted. Give me the ******** pictures or I’ll cut your ******** balls off and shove them down your throat. How’s that?”

"It's not good." Hematite always wound the watches of his boots so that they were just barely out of alignment with his weapon. The ticking between the three timepieces was jarring, without a pattern. It made people nervous. It made them angry. It made them stupid.

"What, my ******** money? You're the one-"

"No, insulting me. I'm getting tired of it already."

"Oh, the insults. Christ almighty." Jeremy was breathing heavily now, and pretty pissed off at the lack of response he was getting from the blackmailer. He didn't have to deal with this s**t! "You are starting to ******** weird me out now, are you happy? You must be so ******** desperate, to have to squeeze money out of guys who CHEAT ON TESTS. Are you proud of yourself? You're society's garbage!"

As Jeremy talked, Hematite began to walk toward him, slowly and singlemindedly. If only there had been a little more light, Jeremy would have seen the look of pure rage on Hematite's face and stopped himself before it was too late. The lieutenant picked up the pace at the very end, before his blackmail victim could run, and in the ensuing struggle Jeremy found himself with a watch-chain around the neck and a steady ticking just behind his right ear.

"DON'T YOU ******** LECTURE ME, YOU WORTHLESS SACK OF s**t!" Hematite growled, pulling the chain of his watch even more tightly against the other boy's throat. If Hematite had it his way, no one would have the barest semblance of the balls to talk back to him. He was everybody else's punching bag, but so long as he was the one with the power here, he'd show the son of a b***h who ought to be feared. You had to start somewhere. "Wait, I take it back, you don't know the half of being worthless. You must be special to someone out there. Your mother? Father? Maybe you've got a girlfriend?"

Jeremy nodded desperately at each option, and was starting to turn blue. As though from a sudden change of heart, the watch-chain went slack, and for a brief moment the blackmail victim thought he was free. He didn't see the hand that had been magically shoved wrist-deep into his chest until Hematite pulled it out, taking a starseed with it.

"Too ******** bad."

Really, the only trouble was getting rid of the body. But, then, Charonite did always leave a shovel by the groundskeeper's shed for just such an emergency...

LT SOLO #3 - Distractions (527)

Khaldun sat on the top bunk, hanging onto a notebook lightly with his injured hand and chewing absentmindedly on his pencil. He didn’t keep diary entries – diaries were for girls, after all – but he would have been a fool not to keep his detailed records of plots and pranks. Secret code was very important, and any useful word had a code word that masked it from ever being deciphered. These strange nonsensical rants filled every other set of pages in his school notebooks, to be indistinguishable from any notes he might take, or at least appear to be notes while he wrote them in his classes. Most ideas were simply no-go for whatever reason, perhaps impossible to execute, maybe a little too much effort for exacting revenge over a petty insult to Khaldun’s ego. A handful were readjusted and redesigned until they were just right, and so trouble would inevitably begin. This was how Khaldun kept his active mind from growing bored. Hillworth students were a safe game in comparison with the efficient Negaverse machine, and there was always a new and exciting way to strike back at someone who’d tried to harm him. Maybe it just came off more poetic on paper to than to simply rip out their star seed for a first offense.

What Nealite had explained to him today had had an effect on him. Even the analogy spoke his language. There wasn’t really a fantastic reason all these months to work hard enough to look worthy of promotion – it was just himself, Nealite, Obsidian, and Charonite, and so long as Charonite was General-King it didn’t matter what the hell the rest of them were. Lieutenant, Captain, or General, they were all below the rank of General-King. And there was only one ‘king’, so to speak. The key, it seemed, was power.

Pages flipped as the teenager moved backward through his archives of nonsense to find part of a translation key he’d devised. Khaldun lived in a simplistic world where there was simply not enough time, energy, or reason to consider the implications what he did had on others. The universe did not revolve around him, but that was no reason not to want to keep living within it. And as far as other people went, who was he to say they did not treat life the same way as he did? Everyone wanted something. Some were quite open about using those around them, while others tried to play up friendship as an excuse. He could do it too. Use people, get what he wanted, all of that. It was not impossible. All he needed was a good reason why to bother with more work. Flip, flip, went the lined paper. He’d find what he was looking for.

A fresh, blank, empty page greeted him, and with a slight flourish of the chewed pencil, words began to grow out of it like graphite weeds. He’d think about that Negaverse stuff later. His roommate was due for a little retaliation… he didn’t like that conspiratorial look the other student had this morning. It was always the people closest to him that he had to keep a careful eye on.

LT SOLO #5 - INTERLUDE (469)

There was a quiet spot on the roof of a building where Hematite usually spent his ‘patrolling’ time staying out of sight and out of danger for many months. It was an excellent vantage point, only a few stories off the ground but with a view of the nearby city streets. Afternoon meant he wasn’t going to bake in his all-black ensemble, but he’d taken off his jacket anyway and balled it into a makeshift pillow to lean his head on against the short wall behind him. He had his worn and torn headphones on, plugged into a battered CD player that could only wish it was second-hand, blasting Iron Maiden.

In some sense he was looking for senshi – Tisiphone specifically – but was putting into his search all the effort of a man afflicted with a terminal illness. There was no such thing as getting away from the Negaverse – here he was, uniform and all, partially on-the-job – but there was such a thing as getting away from Charonite and all of Hematite’s fellow Lieutenants, even for a little while. Like a parody of cloud-watching, he stared down into the streets to play a guessing game with himself.

The people of Destiny City were resilient, continuing to fill the sidewalks and cars and buildings even when they were so easily picked off for their star seeds. He could see mothers dragging behind them undisciplined children who they had never truly loved, perhaps never even meant to have. There were businessmen talking over coffee, as good as buying and selling human lives for money with whatever sort of deals they were making. A man played guitar on the closest street corner with his case open for charity, presumably a con man or a particularly dishonest musician looking to play on heartstrings as well as guitar strings. Hematite didn’t even feel disgusted at the ideas, merely unsurprised. This was humankind. They were walking, talking betrayal, self-interest, and survival, more like animals than anything. And even being a ranking officer of the Negaverse, he could only look down on them as below him. The universe owed Hematite power, it owed him respect and above all a chance to finally not be the one kicked around all the god-damn time. And Hematite could not trust anyone but himself to make that a reality.

He closed his eyes for a while and drowned out the world with his music. He didn’t see the young man who returned a woman’s wallet. He didn’t see the kindness on the faces of the people who gave the musician the benefit of the doubt and gave him their money and trust that he was down on his luck. But even if he had, Hematite always suspected a motive, a façade, a game. There was no such thing as altruism.

Memory returned in time, but not easily. The entirety of it didn’t come back to him as some open book indexed perfectly. He needed reminders. Things that looked familiar, or sounded familiar, it was only when it triggered the concealed memory that it became something he could freely remember again. Kaia’s apartment, which originally looked to him like some horrible, alien, unfriendly landscape, was just a room with some furniture in it. Nothing worrying about that. Normal was pretty refreshing now, actually. It made everything seem suddenly novel, and it made him dangerously curious about everything.

Little by little, blanks were filled in. He knew who he was, and he knew a passable amount of information about his preferences and opinions and all sorts of personal information. Not nearly as much as he must have had before; there was a ways to go. But unlike before, things made sense. Understanding banished his nightmares. All that he had seen and feared, he had feared because he couldn’t remember, and therefore couldn’t make sense of. Good riddance to all of that. His reflection in the mirror was more familiar now but still off. He looked ill, like he’d been sick for a long time and had yet to recover. A miserable kind of sickness, not really a sickness at all. Something that had practically driven him to... well, that couldn’t be right.

The only downside to all this was that he got one hell of a headache from aggravating the psychic injury too much at a time. He had to take it easy on the remembering, which was probably one of the weirder things he could recall doing. Maybe that was cheating to say it, maybe he’d done weirder things and just couldn’t remember them. The problem was that none of the fragments of memory he’d already regained ever went farther back than three years.

It was a little puzzling. How could he know he was nineteen years old but only have three of them? Kaia wasn’t the best person to ask. She remembered even less than he did. It did give him the reassurance that maybe this was normal. It wasn’t like he’d gone out and asked anyone else. Letting him loose on the world in this state wasn’t high on Kaia’s priorities. At least he didn’t have the time for theorizing much. He was kept pretty busy with chores around the apartment. It was the most use Kaia was going to get out of having a spacey new roommate.

He couldn’t shake an underlying feeling of disappointment, and the sense that there was more to know than he had at his disposal. But complacency in his condition came, and it was far less stressful than worrying.