Whispers

there's a fire burning in my bones	I bleed when I fall down	it's gonna be forever
waiting on the love of my life	rest your fragile bones	miles and miles in my bare feet
bandaids won't fix bullet holes	all we need is just to be	I can read you like a magazine

all we need is just to be
(drabble)

They stumbled in together— No, they would have stumbled had they not had each other. The Database had thrown Meld’s arm over her shoulders; he let her lean on him just so. They walked together in from the dirtiest, bloodiest fistfight they’d had to extract their target out of in a long time.

Target delivered, they sat down beside each other in the waiting area for the medical bay assigned to their team. They didn’t say anything. They weren’t impatient at the wait for others more urgently wounded.

His shoulder bumped into hers. Their contentment bled together through the touch.


rest your fragile bones

Those who remembered—Whisper remembered, voices over her sleepy in the bed, fighting—they had something solid under the haziness of memory, the ruins of who they could have been, fragile bones beneath the packed dirt of the cities they had become.

Whisper stirred on the familiar couch, older than she was; it had been her fathers before she’d been taken by the military. She studied her father’s worn visage in the firelight, hand never leaving her husband’s unconscious form.

“Do you remember,” she asked softly, as though he were another operative, as if he knew what she meant, “before?”

Her father exhaled the weight of all the years they had been apart. She could feel the heaviness in her bones.

She remembered the whispered voices of her family, remembered it was not the military that taught her to tread softly and to be quiet and still until danger passed.

“Sometimes it’s better not to,” he answered, as though he too remembered.

Whisper could not say he was wrong.


I bleed when I fall down

This is the girl they call Shift. She’s eight years old on a retrieval mission, learning to break into secure facilities, and a guarding hostile puts a bullet in her stomach.

She’s bleeding and she goes down, choking on the blood, knife leaving her hand and finding its mark.

She doesn’t die. She’s too angry to die that they shot her, that they’re after the rest of her team, and she’s yanking together her molecules and holding them tightly, willing them to hold in the blood as she struggles to clamber to her feet.

Her leader holds her down, holds her wound. “Stay down, Shift. Don’t you die on me,” Watcher whispers fiercely in Shift’s ear.

This is the woman they call Shift. She’s eight years old and she’s bleeding out, but she isn’t hurt, she isn’t dying. She’s too angry to die.