The house was a fixer-upper.
"I think you mean, 'a fucking wreck'," said Duane Keller when Tyr mentioned that little bit of realtor wisdom to him.
Tyr Andersen squinted up at the missing tiles and the flaking paint, and then at the windows. The shards of broken glass around the edges looked like rings of teeth. At his side Duane let out a humorless laugh and crossed his hands behind his head, bunching up his ponytail in a messy tangle of brown. He kicked a cracked tile out of the leaves that littered the whole area.
"I guess," Tyr allowed.
"I don't think there's even one single window in this house that isn't broken," Duane said.
"There isn't." Replacing them all was going to get costly. Then again he'd have done that anyway -- single-pane lost too much heat, and beside he wanted bulletproof glass.
Tyr got an incredulous stare in response to his placid tone. He smiled, just barely, and pushed the door open.
"You are kind of insane, you know that?" Duane griped, even as he followed him inside. Tyr's faint smile widened slightly.
It was dark inside, because broken glass or not, the windows weren't all that big and the house crowded by a whole forest's worth of trees. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and flicked it on.
The floor was all over mud. The wallpaper bloomed with black stains, shredded slices fluttering in the draft. No appliances anywhere, someone had even made off with a light switch.
There were abandoned beer cans in the living room, and blackened wood in the ancient chimney that no one had bothered to clear away. The walls sported an impressive collection of scrawls and crude drawings.
"Just great. You bought the local teenage hangout. And here I thought it was far enough from the city..."
"There's a bus."
"To where? I thought the whole point was the big great amount of nothing on this stupid mountain."
Tyr smiled, again. Duane was such a city boy.
"Whoa. Third smile of the day. Careful, you're reaching your weekly quota."
"We're not at war anymore," he countered quietly. "I don't have to ration them out."
Duane paused, startled. Tyr gave the room a last measuring look, then pulled a roll of trash bags out of his backpack and started picking up the litter. He could feel Duane's eyes on him, but it didn't bother him.
They hadn't really been close, during the war. Tyr hadn't been close to anyone. He was a solo operative. He had signed on the dotted lines and taken the pills and gone into the job with his eyes wide open as to the likelihood he would get to come back -- close to none. A suicide bomber, more or less, except there were so many places to bomb he'd decided to postpone the suicide part. Along the way he'd even started actively trying to survive.
Duane was one of the dozen of operatives who'd gone where he had gone and come back crazy enough to go again, and sometimes it had been more efficient to go together. They'd never talked about their reasons, their pasts, their anything. It didn't matter to people who were going to die and the odds were so far against them it was just ridiculous to tell themselves otherwise.
Even now that the war was over there was still a chance they'd die.
"You're happy," Duane said, almost soft, confused.
Bent over to pick up a bottle, Tyr sat on his haunches and looked back at him as he considered the question. He had bled on Duane. He supposed he might as well answer him. "Content. I suppose."
"I never thought I'd see the day." Duane stroked his chin, eyes narrowing in a not-quite-serious way. "Most likely because I assumed if it ever came I'd be too busy staring as the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trot by to notice."
Tyr pushed the roll of plastic bags at his chest. "Make yourself useful and pick up the trash."
"Urgh. Sir, yes sir."
Duane was just about the person with the least amount of respect in the chain of command Tyr had ever met in his twenty-two years of life. But when he started working, he didn't slack off. He made a game of it; left his bag in the middle and lobbed things at it. Rarely missed. Satisfied, Tyr went back to work.
They'd met by chance at the General's office, one going and one coming. Duane had asked him where he was going, casual, not caring much; Tyr had told him. Looked at him. Thought 'why not' and asked him if he wanted to come with. Duane had nothing better to do.
It wasn't bad like this. The work went by faster. The forest rustled lazily all around them, full of brambles and fallen branches that would have been noisy to cross; he felt almost safe in there. Of course he would have to set up a series of security cameras, but that could wait until he had electricity again. Right now he didn't even have a screen to watch the feed on.
"Right." He surveyed the room. The tiled floor needed a wash or three, but that stuff was still in the car. It would do for now. "First floor."
"Woohoo, time to explore."
The stairs creaked under their feet.
"It would be real stupid to fall to our deaths now, wouldn't it?" Duane said with disturbing cheer, and pushed his full weight against the banister. Tyr gave a snort.
"You'd have to really want to die to kill yourself from this height."
"Hey, I could break my neck."
Tyr stopped at the top stair and eyed the drop. No, he didn't think so. Not after the treatment. "Maybe if you jumped from the roof," he offered. "And landed on your head. Though the soil is a bit soft."
Duane started laughing and shoved his shoulder. "Man, if the shrinks heard you!"
Tyr sighed. "... What did I say wrong now?"
Duane, of course, refused to explain. Tyr sighed again at his continued snickering and started opening doors to see what lay behind.
"Oh, look, an... empty room," Duane commented, and flung the next door open with a flourish. "And what's this? Oh my. Another empty room." He had to kick in the next; the frame was swelled with humidity. "And a third! What a surprising trend. I wonder, what could be behind that fourth door? Dun dun dun... Will our contestant be able to guess?"
"A closet."
Duane did a double-take. "... Why, so it is."
"I did see the floor plan."
"Cheater."
Tyr entered one of the rooms. Someone had had sex in there, several times if he could believe the smell of old sweat and the used condoms.
"My bad. It's not a wreck, it's a virginity cemetery for drunken teenage idiots. That's even sadder somehow. I really don't get why you're moving here, Andersen. You're depriving so many kids of the only spot of sordid in their fun little lives."
Duane groused like he breathed. At the beginning, during their first joint missions, it had annoyed the hell out of him; he'd gotten used to it somehow. It helped that he'd learned to filter out the strange references and hyperboles to get to the matter underneath.
"I'm staying with the military. I needed a place to live."
"I can guess that much, thanks. I'm just asking why you didn't get a studio by the base. Hell, I'd have expected you to ask for a bed in a dorm somewhere."
Tyr peered quickly through the window. Nothing moved, so he leaned in for a longer look. That tree would have to be cut down. Too close to the house. The blinds were rusted, but still moved. He closed them.
"Too many people in a dorm," he said. "And the beds in the corners are always taken."
"Was that... a joke?" Duane asked, blinking.
"... Sort of. It's true enough." That was what made the best misdirection.
He wasn't sure he wanted to misdirect Duane, though. He looked at him for a few seconds. Taller than Tyr by about six inches, thicker too -- none of it fat -- but he always wore such baggy clothes you never really noticed. A scruffy three-days beard, and hair down to his shoulder blades in long tangles of honey-brown. Tyr's unmanageably thick hair was already overgrown from his usual crew cut, but Duane had just never tried to keep it that way, and when a Black Ops soldier wanted his hair that way, you didn't tell him no. He stood with hands in his pockets, spine loose and shoulders slumped, kind of bored. He looked like a college bum. A bum who could kill a man in a variety of interesting ways.
If one could call a Supes a man, but neither of them had never been prone to the peculiar delusion that made Supes something other than people. Enemy, but still people.
Tyr had bled on him. They'd bled on each other. He owed him better.
"I'm going to stop the treatment."
Something went crack under Duane's hand. He stared at Tyr, hard. Tyr stared back. It was dark in here with the blinds closed, but that wasn't really a hindrance, now was it? In a couple of months it would be even less of one.
Because either he'd see better, or he'd be dead.
"Tell me you're talking about your acne," Duane said in a harsh tone that didn't match the flippant words.
"I don't follow a treatment for acne. Or for anything else."
"Andersen, damn it," Duane growled, impatient, and his eyes flashed briefly in the dark.
"You know like I do that the suppressants were never meant for long-term use. My kidneys are showing signs of wear. I need to stop."
"You could do dialysis!"
Tyr shook his head mutely.
He didn't say a thing as Duane started to pace, legs stiff. It surprised him how angry that seemed to make Duane, actually. He smiled a little.
"What's so funny?"
He shook his head. He wouldn't have known how to explain. "You're stopping the treatment too."
Duane paused for a second, staring at him, and then let out an irritated snort. "How the fuck do you know that -- no, never mind. You eavesdropped, didn't you."
Tyr shrugged. "You were loud."
Duane gave him a hard, unconvinced look and then sighed. "Whatever. I'm stopping because it's military restricted drugs and they don't hand them out like candy at any drugstore in the country. I didn't want to serve, I wanted to kill the sonovabitches."
"And you'd rather die than stay now that it's over," Tyr observed, voice quiet. He shouldn't have understood, but he did. The sense of order promised by the military appealed to him. It had never appealed to Duane.
"...Yeah. I'd rather die than stay. But you're staying, so what the fuck. What gives?"
"I told you, they're making me sick. It didn't matter before. It does now. I don't want to hang on ten years with a greatly reduced quality of life. If I die, I die."
"So you could die next month, so you go and blow your money on a house to live in? Where's the logic in that?"
"If I die, it won't matter that I emptied my bank account. If I live, I have fifteen acres to live on."
Duane let out a loud sigh, and then a dry laugh. "Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Fifteen acres? Not too shabby."
"I'll buy more when I have the money. I want the mountain."
"To live on." He could see from Duane's face that he was starting to understand his intentions.
"Yeah."
"After you..."
"Yeah."
Duane leaned his back against the wall and chuckled, though that was more surprise than amusement. "Planned it all, huh. But you're close enough to that bus stop. Is that safe?"
"I don't think I'll want to stay by the road," Tyr said, considering. "I'll probably head upslope. Pretty empty."
"Yeah, but you can't tell what you'll do until it happens. I mean, you know what the doctors told us. You got the lecture too, didn't you, about what could happen if you stopped the treatment."
Tyr frowned. "Don't."
He'd had the lecture -- three times. One time six years ago, before the first injection, and two more times when he mentioned stopping the suppressants, from his doctor and then from his superior officer. He would have gotten more, he knew, if the officer he had discussed it with wasn't scared of insisting after Tyr's response. 'I was extensively briefed on the topic, sir. Was there anything else.'
They weren't sure what to do with an ex-Black Ops agent who wasn't under medical control anymore. Black Ops wasn't supposed to have ex-agents; you went in there to die. From the treatment, from the enemies, from your allies if you lost it or changed your mind and tried to desert. But the war was over and there he was, and now he'd been handed three months of paid leave just so they'd get some time to figure out that mess he'd landed his chain of command in. It wasn't like they could easily discharge a sane, healthy war hero against his will, not during peacetime -- they'd face too many awkward questions.
Duane raked a hand through his hair. "Alright, alright. You know what'll happen. Still, doing it alone... Maybe you should look for a mentor. Someone who'd know about it."
"Someone who went off their meds?" He gave a frown. That hadn't been allowed until very recently. "I don't know where to find a deserter." Nor did he want to.
"I mean, someone who's never been on them in the first place." Duane grumbled. No one in Black Ops liked to think too hard about the origin of the treatment, before it was a treatment, back when it was still a virus. "You know, a natural."
Tyr pushed away from the window. He was tired of this room; the smell was starting to bother him. He'd have to use a lot of bleach. "Funny, when I asked the General about any locals, he told me to stay away from them. They don't like us much."
Duane grumbled under his breath as he fell into step with him. "At least you've got locals. My strain's so rare I think all of us guys who got it, got it from the same one guy." He smirked then, roguish and full of teeth. "Story goes they found him on death row. Normal drug wouldn't work so that's how the officials noticed. In the end they'd taken so much blood and spinal fluid he kicked it anyway."
Tyr arched a doubtful eyebrow. "Death row? He'd have to have been in prison a lot longer than a month before they executed him."
Duane chuckled and peered in the other rooms as they went. "Ruin a good story, why don't you -- okay, why is there a ladder in there?"
He had disappeared up through the trapdoor in the closet ceiling before Tyr could double back. He followed, jumping up to catch the first rungs and pulling himself up with his hands until his feet could find purchase.
It was a room under the eaves, the slant of the ceiling making a good half of the area awkward to stand in, the floor all pale, golden wood. Not a lot of their visitors seemed to have found the place; it smelled dusty more than anything else and there was no litter to be seen. Duane was already at the window, sitting in the alcove as he scanned the ground. Tyr joined him to look -- nothing but trees for miles. After that, you could see the city, and there were a couple of places where the branches were thin enough that you could see the road that crawled up the mountain; he made note to put a camera on the roof, once the tiles were repaired.
"Okay, I guess your house isn't that bad," Duane admitted half-heartedly after a few seconds of contemplation. Tyr smiled a little.
"The rent is pretty low, too."
No one had ever accused Duane of having a slow mind. Tortuous, maybe, but not slow. It took him maybe half a second to remember that Tyr had bought the house up front. He jerked his head up. Tyr was watching him and met his eyes straight on.
"Lower for those who help me remodel," he added.
Duane stared at him as if trying to read his mind.
"... I'll be out of meds in three months," he pointed out quietly.
"By then I'll have been off them for two. I can deal with you if need be."
Duane scoffed at that. "Deal with me! As if. But, yeah, okay, maybe. But we don't have the same strain."
"So?"
"So you know that proverb about cats and dogs? Next thing you know I'll be eating your face."
"Unless I get you first."
"Oh, you wouldn't."
Tyr arched an eyebrow. "I remember that mission--"
"Shut up."
A smirk lifted a corner of Tyr's mouth. "So. Remodeling?"
There was a second of pause, a bit too long to seem natural, and then Duane huffed and made a vaguely disgusted moue. "Yeah... Unless I want to live in piss and drugs, I'll have to, won't I."
"Mmh."
"And I want this room," he added, mildly challenging.
Tyr snorted. "I thought you would."
He went back to the trapdoor and slipped back out. He could hear Duane muttering to himself annoyedly for a couple of minutes before he followed.
Tyr had shared enough missions with Duane to learn he only groused when he was mostly satisfied. It was when he went grim-faced and quiet that you had to watch out.
Tyr started gathering trash again, making note of what repairs were needed and where. His mental list of necessary supplies was already twice as big as it had been when he parked the car earlier. Duane joined him, quiet in a thoughtful way.
"Hey."
"Hm?"
"Why'd you ask me? We didn't get along all that well, and I'm not the one you were closest to. That was Serrano, right?"
Tyr took a few seconds to think about it. Why had he offered, really? "You were there."
"... During the war?"
Tyr smirked. "That too. But I meant in the office."
Duane gave him an incredulous look. "What, that's it? I just happened to be there?"
A shrug.
"I feel so flattered," Duane complained. "Loved, too, I feel really loved. Did Serrano say no? Now I'm second best. Let me tell you something, Duane Keller is never second best."
"You're not second best."
"Oh, be still, my heart-- "
"You're third. Serrano and Wright are getting there tomorrow."
Duane attempted to glare at him for a couple of seconds, and then gave up and burst out laughing.
"You're an asshole, Andersen. I think I like you."
Tyr gave him a placid look. "That won't get you out of unclogging the toilet."
A wine cork sailed toward his head. Tyr sent it back; Duane proceeded to swat it out of the air and straight into his trash bag. Showoff. "You jerk. Abusing my tender feelings."
Duane went off, humming under his breath. Tyr started trying to figure out the wiring.
Outside the sun was setting over the mountains. In less than a hour they'd have to stop working, good night vision or not. Night was coming and his flashlight wouldn't last long.
It was the last full moon he'd live as a human.