Sleep came slowly and never quite felt like it claimed him, so it was a surprise when Danya woke to find the glow of morning light illuminating the now empty tent. Not only was Simon gone, but so too were his bag and the bedding he had slept on the night before.

Cold dread settled into Danya’s gut. Simon had left him. After a good night’s sleep, Simon had thought over his options and decided that simply abandoning his burden was the simplest way out of the situation. 

How long would it take for someone to find him? Would they treat him as a runaway, or would they believe that this situation hadn’t been his choice?

Danya let out a shaky scoff. Of course the blame would be placed solely at his feet. Why would anybody even consider that Simon could be at fault when it was so much simpler to punish Danya?

By the time Hamish poked his head into the tent, Danya had just about worked himself up into a state of panic. “Time to go, pup.”

As Danya hurried to follow Hamish outside and down now crowded rows of tents, he kept his head down and did his best to simply breathe. For now, for this moment, everything was okay. He hadn’t been abandoned — yet.

Simon waited to the side of the main gate on the back of his dark mare, the reins of Hamish’s paint gelding in his hand. His gaze paused and held on Danya, then jumped to Hamish with eyebrows raised in question.

Hamish shrugged. “He woke up alone in your tent. Of course he looks worried.”

Simon nodded, all interest immediately evaporating now that he knew Danya’s distress had been his own doing. Still, for a moment there he had looked at Danya, noticed he was upset, and cared. Maybe only because he thought somebody had disrespected him by proxy by messing with his property, but it was something.

Hamish did all the work of getting Danya up onto the horse behind Simon, because by that point Simon had decided to go back to pretending Danya didn’t exist. 

Danya shifted, trying to get into a position that didn’t feel awkward, but that was impossible. The entire situation was awkward. He tried resting his hands on his own thighs, but quickly grabbed for Simon’s waist when the horse started moving.

It didn’t help that, the moment Danya was distracted, he found himself leaning into Simon much more closely than he needed to. Forcing himself to lean back again was physically uncomfortable.

Simon just felt so… solid. As though even when being in proximity with him was the source of Danya’s current discomfort, getting closer to him could somehow nullify it. The energy of every living thing had a different feel to it, and Simon’s was one of strength and safety. Danya wanted to drown himself in it, but he felt like he could barely get his feet wet.

The area surrounding the camp was all farmland, fields of corn stretching out endless and identical. Slaves worked the fields, young and old, men and women. These weren’t pampered Companions like Danya. These were mages who existed to work.

But perhaps they had things better than he did. At least some of them got to grow old, and perhaps they were even allowed family. Did children work alongside their parents in the field? Danya had never met his father, and he couldn’t remember his mother.

After about half an hour of riding, the farmlands gave way to scrubby, untended grassland.

The first long, wooden pole Danya saw, laying flat in a ditch along the side of the road, he assumed was simply a fallen tree. It was only when he saw a second, resting diagonally against a crest of rocks, that he noticed the torn wires rusting from the crossbeam attached to the top and realised what he was looking at: pre-war electricity poles. They had been left where they had fallen to be slowly reclaimed by nature.

Where Danya had grown up, everything had either been cleaned up and restored or destroyed and cleared away, but out here nobody had ever bothered with such things. A car sat abandoned along the roadside, its doors removed for salvage long ago and grass growing along its roof. Danya had always known the war had happened, of course, but seeing the reality of the past made it feel so much closer.

On the top of a small mountain, a tall, metal tower protruded into the sky. Danya had seen them before. There was one on the outskirts of the town Milaine House was in. He had been told that they used to allow people to communicate with others anywhere else in the world, but now they were mostly used to send messages across the small territory they lived in and relaying signals from slave tracking chips, like the one implanted in Danya’s wrist.

The town Danya had grown up in, where Milaine House was located, was approximately in the centre of the human territory they lived in. They were heading south now. If they rode long enough in this direction — perhaps a week — they would reach the southern border. The territory was long and narrow, so the borders to the east and west were much closer. 

Beyond those borders lay the wilds. Nobody was quite sure what lay out there, but all agreed that it wasn’t safe. There were monsters and bandits and the thick woods were all too easy to get lost in.

At the far north lay the mountain pass that led to another inhabited territory much like their own. Icy storms constantly raged along the treacherous path through the mountains, and anyone who attempted the journey risked their life to do so.

And that was their world. They didn’t know what lay beyond. They didn’t know if there were other settlements out there, perhaps much bigger than their own and living lives that more closely resembled things before the war. Maybe they were all that was left.

Once, at a party, Danya had admired a mural of the world painted to take up an entire wall. The host had seemed thrilled with his interest. She had pointed to their place in this world, pressed the tip of her finger to it and told him that she was easily covering every part of the world they still knew. He had been humbled by the scale of the unknown.

“Are you hungry?”

Danya had been so distracted that Simon’s voice almost made him jump, and then it took him another moment to realise that Simon had been addressing him, not Hamish. “No, sir.”

He would need to eat eventually, but any energy he took in from a source other than Simon would only bring him further out of balance. Simon’s energy was slowly feeding into him, and he was hoping it would be enough to at least temporarily return him to a state of inner stability. He was already feeling calmer and a bit more able to resist the urge to cling to Simon.

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ when we’re alone together,” Simon said. “Or when it’s just us and Hamish. He doesn’t count as another person in regards to any rules I give you.”

“Wow, rude,” Hamish commented. “You see how rude he is to me, Danya? I don’t count as a person.”

“As another person,” Simon clarified. “We’ve been friends so long that you’re basically an extension of myself.”

“Hmm…” Hamish leant forward in his saddle and tapped his chin. “Okay, that’s acceptable. We have known each other a fucking long time. It’s been, mm…”

“Eight years.”

“Yup, eight years now.”

“Did you know one another before you joined the military?” Danya asked.

“Nah, we both joined up at sixteen, and that’s when we met,” Hamish explained. “Let me tell you, the military life didn’t really match up with my expectations.”

“Oh?”

“Simon’s whole family has been in the military, but me? I just thought it would be the best way to fuck men.”

Simon shot Hamish a look. “Should you really be telling him this?”

“He’s not gonna tell anyone.”

“I won’t,” Danya confirmed. “We’re trained to respect the privacy of our masters and their associates. After all, many men obtain a slave specifically because their desires are… unconventional.”

Simon scoffed. “Most of them just want to unconventionally have sex with a thirteen year old.”

“Anyway,” Hamish continued. “I was wrong. See, military camps are segregated by sex. You can’t even bring a female slave into a male military camp, so male slaves are used for all purposes. Everyone knows this means that men have sex with male slaves, and that’s fine. But—”

“And butts are the crux of the issue.”

“Yes, thank you, Simon. But when a slave is involved, the assumption is that he’ll be on the receptive side of things and that makes it okay.”

Danya didn’t even realise that he’d made a small sound in the back of his throat until Hamish raised expectant eyebrows at him. “Well, I— that isn’t always the way things go, sir. We do whatever our masters ask of us.”

He was thinking specifically of Duran and his master. They had tried doing things more conventionally for the first few months until Duran’s master had brought up the idea of switching their roles. They had fit together so much more comfortably that way that Duran had realised his master had wanted that from him all along, but had been too embarrassed to ask for it even from his own slave.

“Oh, yeah, I bet a good half of them are switching roles at least sometimes, but it’s all part of this fiction we collectively maintain. We only have sex with men because women aren’t available. We only take a penetrative role because nobody would ever want to be penetrated. And so forth. So here I am, sixteen years old and still waiting on a growth spurt, making it pretty fucking clear that I will suck any dick that gets within arms reach of me—”

“Hamish,” Simon cut in again. “Have you considered that he might not want to hear about this?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind at all,” Danya assured him. “The better I understand the culture of military life, the more quickly I can adapt to my new circumstances.”

Also, although it would be improper to say so, he was enjoying the story. It wasn’t half as crude as some of the tales Duran had shared with him and Fanner, and it was nice to feel like Hamish liked him well enough to share such personal information.

“See? He’s fine,” Hamish said. “So anyway, I wasn’t very popular, and I was small, and I barely knew which end of a sword to hold. I honestly think I might not have survived. But then Simon, who has his family’s reputation, who was nearly full grown by the time he was sixteen, who’d been learning to fight since before he could walk… Fucking Simon tells them to knock it off and focus on more important things, and they do! And he didn’t even want me to suck his dick.”

“You probably would have told the whole camp about it in vivid detail.”

“Not true! I only tell you that shit,” Hamish objected. “Anyway, that’s the story of how me and Simon became friends. I don’t get to tell the full version very often.”

“Do you really wish you had more opportunity to tell people about how much of an idiot you were?”

“In the past! That was past me. Present me is completely fine with laughing at past me.”

“How about I punch you in the dick, and then in a few minutes time we can bond over how much of an asshole past me was?”

“Oh, yeah, ‘cause in a few minutes time present you won’t be an asshole.”

“I’m not an asshole.”

“Yeah?” Hamish turned back to look at Danya. “What do you think, pup? Is he an asshole?”

“Uh—” Danya’s eyes went wide and his arms tensed around Simon’s waist. “No, sir, of course not.”

Hamish scoffed. “I’m sure that’s absolutely your honest assessment. You don’t have to call me sir when nobody else is around either, by the way. We like to keep things casual, but you know. Gotta maintain a certain appearance in public.”

“I understand. Perception is important.” Danya was silent for a moment. “I apologise if this is too bold, but... is the intention that I will be given to Hamish, in an informal sense? I realise I’m more to his... tastes.”

Hamish laughed. Simon didn’t. The silence between them stretched for just a little too long.

“No,” Simon said flatly. “The situation is more complicated than you understand, which is fine, because I intended it to be. Don’t worry about it.”

“Simon, that’s not fair,” Hamish cut in. “Of course he’s going to worry about this stuff.”

“No, it’s fine,” Danya said quickly. “Really. I only wanted to know so that I could behave appropriately. It’s not his job to worry about me.”

Simon was silent for a long moment before he finally let out a sigh. When he spoke, his voice was gentler this time. “I’m not going to give you to anyone else. Last night, when Hamish offered to take you, it was because he knew I wanted some time alone.”

“I’m sorry that I was disruptive.”

“You apologise too much.”

“I—will take that criticism on board.”

Hamish laughed and smoothed sweat-damp curls away from his face. “Ugh, it’s hot. Danya, aren’t you hot in that?”

Danya looked down at his robe. It covered just about everything other than his head, hands, and feet, and the fabric was fairly thick. “No. Mages are better at regulating their body temperature than humans.”

“That sounds nice,” Simon commented. “I’m already getting gross and sweaty.”

“Maybe I could…” Danya held his hand out in front of him and focussed on cold, wiggling his fingers as he felt heat being drawn out of them. He pressed his palm against the back of Simon’s neck.

Simon made a startled sound and jerked away from Danya’s touch, bringing his own hand up to cover his neck. “What the fuck was that?”

“His hand,” Hamish said.

Danya’s stomach clenched and he felt like he was going to be sick. He’d messed up, again, in the same way he always did. He was too bold, too independent, too presumptuous. He was no different from Fanner, really — they both knew their faults, but neither of them could keep themselves from repeating them.

“Well, it felt weird,” Simon said. “Like ice.”

He needed to apologise. He could barely breathe. Even when he tried his best, he kept slipping up because he was a fraud. He could never be what he pretended. He wasn’t a Companion

“I’m sorry,” Danya whispered. He sounded like a child.

Simon rubbed his hand against the back of his neck again and twisted back to glance at Danya. “It’s fine. You just caught me by surprise.”

Danya’s throat ached. He wished he could bury his face against Simon’s back without it being weird.

“Here.” Simon reached his hand back and held it out for Danya. “Necks are a bit sensitive.”

Danya took Simon’s hand and for a moment all he could do was hold it in his own and savour the contact. He didn’t deserve it, but he did need it. He took a steadying breath and slowly, carefully began to draw heat away from Simon’s skin.

“Huh,” Simon said, his fingers wiggling curiously against Danya’s. “It feels strange. Nice, though.”

Danya’s chest swelled with pride even though it was barely a compliment. It was the first thing he had done that Simon had even vaguely approved of.

“Let me feel,” Hamish said, reaching out for Danya’s other hand. 

Simon didn’t show any signs of objection, so Danya let him take it. He shut his eyes as he focussed on drawing heat away from the two men’s skin.