Ocean's Echo (The Resolution Universe)

by Everina Maxwell

Yes, he was coming off a days-long hangover, and yes, his meals and sleep were all over the place because the concept of scheduling was fatally dull, but surely he didn’t look like that much of a mess.

They had an array of tiny glass, flint, and silver studs decorating their cuff, which was nonstandard—flint was common, and glass was a galactic way of indicating nonbinary, but silver didn’t have a meaning Tennal knew. Either they’d explain when they wanted to, or they wouldn’t. Tennal vaguely settled on gender irrelevant, maybe fem-aligning.

“Lieutenant Yeni,” Tennal said, deceptively smooth, “I’ll be on the bridge, but you are going into deep space in a tiny shuttle. And besides, if you think I’m going to sit with those fuckers on the bridge without an open comms channel to the one person I trust in this whole Lights-lost fleet, then please have your cognitive functions checked.”

Occasionally Tennal caught himself speculating about whether he still had a chance with Surit. Not when Surit came out of the shower or stripped down to his underwear to sleep—Tennal knew what a set of good abs looked like; he could find those anywhere—but when Surit absently passed him the water jug at breakfast, hair askew on his forehead, listening to whatever Tennal was complaining about, or said, “Tired?” with casual concern when they came back in late—then, Tennal was in unexpected trouble.

Surit knew his own tendencies, which had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with people who were lightning strikes on dead land.

Everything in Surit wanted to say yes, to take what was offered, cup his hands under a firework and try to catch the falling embers. But he knew that wasn’t how he was. He knew once he latched on to someone, he would try to hold on to them to the end of time, and that would be messy. His chest hurt. Tennal deserved honesty. Surit shook his head. “I don’t work like that.” “Thought so.” It was gentle. Tennal was softening his edges for Surit. That only widened the rip in Surit’s chest.

“It’s private,” Basavi said. “I told xam—” She looked discomposed. Oh, this must’ve gone further than Tennal had guessed. That sounded like Istara had a personal gender reference beyond they, and they’d let Basavi use it. Sometimes people had more nuances to their gender than Tennal bothered with for his own, and sometimes they were public about it, but sometimes they weren’t; sometimes it was a major stage of intimacy just to let someone know. Unsurprisingly not many people had ever trusted Tennal that much. Tennal wasn’t going to ask about Istara’s personal gender, because he had some sense of propriety despite his best efforts and Basavi clearly hadn’t meant to say it, but he did have questions about Istara and Basavi hooking up.

Tennal should’ve probably let whatever treatment this was finish. But Tennal had gone to the ends of the earth and the far reaches of outer space to avoid being picked over by concerned people in military medic uniforms, and even when the rest of his mind was bobbing like a fishing lure in a whirlpool, he was very clear on one thing: fuck this.

“I raised you,” the legislator said brusquely. “And do you know what? From the time you were fourteen up until now, I had a front-row seat to the way you turned every single one of your destructive urges on yourself. It was brutal. It was like launching a brand-new, fresh-off-the-line warship and watching it fire all its shells at its own hull. For bloody years.”

Surit kissed him. There was no room to think. Tennal made a noise of surprise then said into his mouth, “Lights, Surit, now?” But before Surit could pull away, Tennal seized the back of his neck and kissed back, unexpectedly hard. If Surit had thought it would be soft, he’d been mistaken; there was no yielding, kissing Tennal—not a millimeter of leeway given or taken. It was like kissing a landslide. Some inconceivably huge space unfolded in his mind, something insupportable, something unbearable.

“It doesn’t matter what we are,” Surit said. It would have bothered him a few days ago, but he’d given himself a mission, and right now there was no room for anything except the mission. “It matters what we do.”

“Funny way of dealing with it,” Tennal said. “I’m personally considered a leading light in the field of maladaptive coping mechanisms, but it’s amazing how I never managed to brainwash hundreds of people and take over the government.”

He lost all sense of time; the moments of his end stretched out, oddly gentle, to eternity. Tennal had not yet noticed Surit was gone. Or perhaps he had—a handful of seconds ago or a thousand years ago. The currents Surit sank into measured time in the deaths of galaxies.