It had become increasingly obvious that the kid wasn’t going to make it through the night.

Darkness had already fallen around them, bringing with it an end to the day’s battles, as much as they ever ended. Sugimoto had carried him back behind their lines, slung over his shoulder; he was some kid from Osaka he was pretty sure was named Sousuke. They’d been next to each other when it came time to run a charge against the Russian fortifications, and following the familiar crack of a Mosin-Nagant the guy crumpled to the ground with all the ceremony of a sack falling off a cart. Sugimoto side-stepped his body to avoid being crushed under his weight and tensed his grip on his stock just in time to meet the Russian pushing toward him blade for blade. The man was huge, a brute, but Sugimoto grit his back teeth together and hooked the hilt-edge of his own bayonet around the rifle’s barrel. His body moved of its own accord in a twist he'd done hundreds of times by now, and the man's gun was tossed aside. Sugimoto dug his back heel into the ground, swung the bayonet back around, and ripped through layers of canvas and wool to get at the soft parts beneath.

The man fell forward, and in his hurry not to be buried beneath six feet of dead Russian Sugimoto stepped into the path of a bullet flying from the lines up ahead. It caught him in the join of his neck and shoulder, tearing through skin and muscle, and he heard a scream of pain ring out, his own, even as he had no awareness of opening his mouth.

It was then he noticed the kid who’d fallen beside him was stirring, still, and had enough fight left in him to push himself up onto his hands and knees. They’d been at it for a month or two, now, long enough for Sugimoto to realize you only survived if, on the battlefield, you thought about yourself and you only. But that kid had only been shot once, same as Sugimoto had, and something possessed him to pick him up by the underarms and haul him back to safety.

Well, it was a good thing Sugimoto hadn’t taken any more hits on the way back, because his stupid random act of kindness wasn’t going to mean much. The kid was getting paler by the minute.

Someone, a medic, had set him up on some kind of makeshift pallet, and at some point an audience had gathered. Maybe this kid was everyone’s best friend or something; Sugimoto hadn’t gotten any fonder of wasting time with this crew since they’d landed, so he didn’t really know. Around his bed they crowded, a handful of them—as if tons of them hadn’t fallen already, to much less fanfare—and there didn’t seem to be anything they could do but stand around and watch him go.

Sugimoto, for his part, felt like he had to see the thing through. It was his fault the kid was bleeding out here instead of in no man’s land, so he hung to the side and watched the rest of them watch the sorry scene, aware all the while of the bullet wound throbbing in his neck.

Second Lieutenant Hanazawa knelt by the kid’s side and held one of his hands between his own. For all that Sugimoto had never seen Hanazawa draw blood in a fight, he wasn’t queasy at the sight of it. The wound had hit the boy in the gut, and blood dribbled out onto his uniform, slowed by the cold but still leaking steadily, but Hanazawa leaned over him with none of the fear you sometimes saw in weak men, as if a wound were a contagious disease. The rest of them—the rest of them stood around like birds waiting for a worm to surface, Sugimoto among them. Maybe they were keeping the kid a little less cold. Blocking the harshest of the wind. Or maybe they were just looking for confirmation they themselves were better off, no matter how cold they were or how bitter their own wounds ached. Reassurance drawn from the misfortunes of another didn’t hurt anyone, not really.

Softly, in an undertone, Hanazawa murmured to the boy. Most of it was unintelligible, but the boy was blinking at an unnatural pace and clinging to his every word with an expression of rapt attention beyond agony. His body leaned off the ground as much as it was still able to, like getting as close as he could to Hanazawa would heal him, somehow. Sugimoto could see every exhale of breath that came out of his mouth as it froze in the air. Weak, and getting weaker. Hanazawa coughed, and said, louder, this time, “They say that all of the soldiers who die in battle become kami whom the Emperor will worship at Yasukuni. You’ll have to greet him for us when you see him there.”

At some point, Ogata had appeared next to Sugimoto’s shoulder, and at Hanazawa’s words a muscle in Ogata's jaw twitched.

He didn’t hold on for much longer, after that. Hanazawa helped a few of the other privates carry the body away to the place where the bodies went. The rest of them dispersed back to their dinners and carefully-doled-out alcohol rations. There wasn’t much left to look forward to besides cards and a long night of injured moans and murmured conversation, followed by a restless morning, and with it, frost over the puddles of day-old rain.

A medic had come over and patched him up at some point, but his neck still throbbed, so Sugimoto packed a spare bandage with chunks of snow. Ogata watched him with a dark gleam in his eye. “How many times is that going to happen before it sticks?”

“Didn't realize you were so concerned about me.” Sugimoto felt a shock go through his back teeth when the cold cloth met his raw skin, but he didn't flinch. Not in front of Ogata, if he could help it.

“I’m not. Just curious.”

The corner of Sugimoto’s mouth lifted in a crooked smile without any mirth in it. “Didn’t you hear? I’m immortal.”

“Did you come up with that yourself?”

“Nah. It was one of the guys in the field hospital. Said I’d been in and out more times than he came in for his shifts.” He twisted his neck from side to side, testing how stiff his shoulders were going to be in the morning. The cold press was taking the edge off, but it was going to be a bitch to wake up to tomorrow no matter what. “It is a stupid nickname, though.”

“At least you know it.” Ogata shouldered his gun, gave Sugimoto’s neck one more long look, and then turned away, calling back over his shoulder, “No one’s immortal, Sugimoto. Just lucky. And no one’s lucky forever.”

-

Sugimoto wandered the ramparts, holding the cold press against his neck and ignoring the feeling of the the snow melting through the bandage onto his fingers, until a passing officer told him in no uncertain terms he’d better report back to his regiment or get drawn up for tardiness. The temporary barracks they’d set up in the trench barely kept out the freezing winds. Once he got there, he pulled the top of his bedroll over his face, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to drown out the sound of the Nikaidous murmuring to each other when they thought people couldn’t hear.

His whole body hurt. His toes hadn’t been dry in weeks. His nose felt like it would fall off his face if he had to be cold much longer. He pushed his hands under his own shirt and held his palms flat against his stomach to try and warm up his fingers. He wanted something hot to eat, with good broth, the kind of thing that filled you up from the inside. He lit up the house because no one else would dare to get close to it.

It needed to be done. It was his duty; he was the only one left of them. The Sugimoto house was old, and it went up easier than a bonfire in summer. The flames crackled and roared, warming his cheeks, and Sugimoto couldn't remember the last time he’d felt so warm. The fire soared up past the rafters, into a blue sky, smoke clouds swirling, and at first he thought it was the sound of the blaze, but the noise kept rising, high, piercing—the blood froze in his veins as he realized it was the sound of screams. His brother and sister were shrieking. That was the sound of his mother’s wails, and under it all his father's groans of pain and terror—he’d checked the bodies as best he could, he was so certain they were dead—Sugimoto leapt through the open doorway and gritted his teeth, pushed past a falling beam that shot sparks that landed in his clothes and burned holes right through his skin everywhere they touched. He did this to them, and now he had to get them out, but he couldn't see anything because the smoke was clogging his vision and flooding his lungs. All he could do was follow the sounds of their agony, but it was a maze, not the childhood home he thought he knew at all, and he couldn't even find the door he’d come through. He was going to die here, they were all going to die here because he killed them—

“Wake up,” growled a familiar voice in his ear, just an undertone, words intended only for him, and Sugimoto's eyes flew open. He was cold from his own sweat, and Ogata's face was very near his; he squinted at him, pulled one of Sugimoto's eyelids down, and then leaned back, took his hand away from Sugimoto’s shoulder. Sugimoto wasn't awake enough to stop himself from reaching out for the hand, pulling it back down where it came from, before he realized what he was doing and dropped it like a hot coal. Even in the blackness of night, he could make out Ogata's eyes, wide and unblinking. He felt, rather than saw, Ogata's breath crystallize in the cold air, and it brushed against Sugimoto's cheek. He swallowed.

“Tsukishima's going to be on your ass if you keep that up,” Ogata muttered, and then turned back to his own bedroll. Sugimoto opened his mouth, as if to explain himself, then closed it.

He tried one more time to swallow around the lump in his throat, pulled his coat around himself, and then burrowed further into himself. The surface of his pack, which he was using as a makeshift pillow, was covered in something between dew and cold sweat. Everything around them was dark. If only to keep his dream at bay, his mind wouldn’t let go of the feeling of Ogata's breath against his face until he fell back into a fitful sleep. He needed the morning to come around so he could go out and fight again, was the last thing in his mind before he fell off. It was impossible trying to sleep when he wasn’t half-dead.

-

They had shipped out for the front in September, just as the autumn chill begun to fall upon Asahikawa. They moved out for the coast in convoys with their boots shining and uniforms in good order and packed themselves tightly into the belly of the ship like cartridges in a magazine. There were people on the shore to wave them off, but no one any of them knew. They had no attachment to any of the people there; they were confined to the barracks in their off-time, for the most part, and so the women who waved them off from the shore were nothing more than a reminder of the sort of basic comfort they wouldn't see for a while.

Port Arthur was the worst place on earth. Sweating humid one day, freezing cold another, with the gulls crying and the crows cawing and the goddamn Russian Maxim guns rattling his back teeth even from far away. The hillside was clawed with trenches dug and abandoned, some moved on from, some fallen back from, and it was strewn with the blown-out bits of things, people, half-buried under rubble. There wasn’t a breath to be taken without smoke and ash.

The brass had cooled on the overhead charges, for once, and so Sugimoto was tending to some of his equipment under a merciless yet not warm midday sun when Ogata came up to him. “Pass me a stripper clip.”

“What?”

“You’re not using it, are you?”

Sugimoto couldn’t think of anything to say to that, because it was true, and he dug around in an ammo pouch for one that he tossed, not especially gently, in the direction of Ogata’s face. Ogata was able to catch it, annoyingly, and he reloaded without having to look at what he was doing at all, which pissed Sugimoto off even more. Ogata turned away from him, stepped up onto the boards, aimed over the ridge, and cracked a shot. Sugimoto didn’t need to ask if he’d hit anyone. You could read it on his smug face.

“We’ve been going about this so stupidly,” Ogata muttered, and Sugimoto glanced back at him.

“How else would you?”

“Don't let anyone through basic training unless they can shoot well, and only send the bare minimum over the hill. They can't hit you if you don't come out. Just wait until they get bored, and then they'll come on their own.”

“What, so everyone should just be like you?”

“I’m going to make it through this war alive. I can’t speak for anyone else.”

“You sound pretty confident about that.”

"You're just insulted because you’re a poor shot," Ogata said, looking him up and down like a schoolmaster, and Sugimoto clenched his fist.

"Yeah, and I've kicked your ass before, haven't I? Didn't matter much then, did it?" With no little effort, he turned back to his boot, where he was trying to rub oil into one of the seams with a fingernail. He wasn’t sure if it actually helped keep out the dampness, but it couldn’t hurt. “Why do you care, anyway? You like feeling better than the rest of us.”

“Bad tactics are bad tactics. If we get pushed back any further and lose the siege, I'd rather not entrust my life to Russian mercy.”

Sugimoto nodded, reluctantly. When it became obvious Ogata wasn’t going to get anything else out of him, he moved on down the line, no doubt looking for another vantage point from which to look out for Russian heads to surface from the other side, like worms after the rain.

Toraji never wanted to talk about tactics. It felt like an eternity since Sugimoto last talked to someone who actually knew how to shoot the shit.

Sugimoto was preparing to get himself back to the makeshift headquarters when he noticed another familiar face walking towards him: the Second Lieutenant. Hanazawa smiled. “Sugimoto! I’m on my way back to camp, would you walk with me?”

Requests from officers couldn’t actually be turned down, but at least this one wasn’t too objectionable, on the surface at least. Sugimoto made his way back alongside Hanazawa, who had a brisk, athletic way of moving to him. Sugimoto was willing to bet he’d grown up practicing kendo, just like he had himself, though Hanazawa probably also knew how to use a real sword, too, before he ever got to the officer’s academy.

Hanazawa didn’t waste time beating around the bush. “Did you know him?”

It took Sugimoto a second to register who Hanazawa was talking about, and then— “No.”

“And you still stopped for him?”

“Look. I was on my way back to the trench anyway. I practically tripped over him.”

Close up, it was obvious he had to be about Sugimoto’s own age. He didn’t look like Ogata at all, except for the eyes, though Hanazawa’s were warm instead of cold. “I just wanted to let you know your bravery hasn’t gone unnoticed. Not many would do what you did out there.”

“Can’t blame them. Everyone’s just trying to make it through with their own skins.”

“Of course. But what separates us from animals, if not being able to care for each other?” Hanazawa stopped and clapped Sugimoto on the shoulder, just for a second, all manly commendation. “You’re a good man, Sugimoto. We can all see that.”

No animals ever killed each other like this, he thought, but didn’t say. Hanazawa had lead them over the hill more times than he could count. He held that kid’s hand as he died. If he were just some armchair officer, Sugimoto would really not be able to stand it, but he wasn’t a coward. Just some guy who hadn’t realized that heroes didn’t exist outside of fairy tales.

Well, wait long enough and he’d figure it out, though Sugimoto didn’t want to think about what it’d take. Things were already bad enough; it felt like a bad omen to think about them getting any worse.

They parted ways when they reached their destination. Tsukishima was giving a report to Tsurumi over by the command tent. It was a fair distance away, so he couldn’t be sure, but Sugimoto thought Tsurumi’s eyes met his own, for a moment, before the lieutenant’s gaze moved on.

-

He woke up in the night from another weird dream, this time of being chased by wolves through the snow, to an empty bedroll beside him. It shouldn't have unnerved him as immediately as it did, but Ogata was only tolerable as long as he stayed predictable.

He let his head fall back and watched the room around him come into clarity as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Ogata didn’t return until the beginnings of dawn light seeping in through the cracks had travelled across to where Sugimoto was sleeping. By the time Ogata entered and got back into bed, you could almost make out the features of his face.

It ate away at him all day. He found himself staring at Ogata during morning muster, until Ogata glanced over and caught him at it and Sugimoto had to pretend he’d been squinting at something behind him. What the hell was he doing in the middle of the night? Did he think, because his brother was the Second Lieutenant, that he could get away with whatever he wanted? No, that didn’t pan out. Sugimoto hardly saw them together, and whenever Ogata talked about his brother he seemed… nasty. More than usual. If he was trying to suck up for special treatment, he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

That afternoon they were tasked with fortifying the embankments, two to a team, hauling around boards and hammers. He ended up with Ogata, again, because luck was never on his side. Normally it wouldn’t have been so bad, because Ogata at least didn’t talk much, which wasn't something he could say for everyone in the division. The sun crept across the sky through a heavy film of clouds. As they worked, they migrated further down the trench out into freshly dug areas Sugimoto hadn’t entered before, where the channel began to bend away from the tide. Down here, even Noma and Okada’s hammering from a little ways away sounded like it came to them through the inside of a seashell. Louder were the gulls, the roar of waves, and the distant thuds of artillery firing somewhere on the other side of the bay.

Sugimoto hauled the boards and Ogata did the nailing. It was mindless work, the kind of labour a body could do without much thought, just like working in the fields back home. Maybe he was so bored his brain wasn’t working straight, and that’s why Sugimoto started the whole thing. He passed Ogata another piece of wood and tried to sound disinterested: “Where were you the other night?”

Ogata glanced at him sidelong but kept at his task, speaking around the nail he held between his teeth. “What are you talking about?”

“You were gone for, what, half an hour? Just before dawn. And don’t play dumb, we both know I’m not lying.”

“Are you accusing me of being a Russian spy? I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, Sugimoto, but I thought you trusted me a little more than that.”

Sugimoto fumbled with the next board he handed him. Ogata was so goddamn annoying. “I don’t know what you were doing and I don’t really care. You’re just not as clever as you think you are.”

Ogata lined the board up in its place and then turned around to face Sugimoto. “I would say the same, but I don’t know if even you think you’re clever.”

It would be great to just hit Ogata again and get out of his system, but something like that was loud enough to draw someone over for sure even if they were a ways off. He set the rest of the boards down on the ground next to him and crowded Ogata against the side of the embankment. He planted a hand on the wall over Ogata’s shoulder. The rough grain of the fresh wood sent splinters into his palm, but Sugimoto just ground his back teeth and leaned in closer, trying in vain to scour Ogata’s eyes for evidence of what was going on inside his head. As usual, there was nothing going on there he liked. “How much longer are you going to keep doing this before you get yourself in trouble you can’t shoot your way out of?”

Ogata looked entirely unfazed. He tilted his head to the side enough for it to brush Sugimoto’s wrist. “I don’t know, Sugimoto. How much longer are you going to keep this up? You know what Noma and Okada are going to think if they come around the corner?”

Sugimoto licked his bottom lip, on reflex. His mouth felt dry. “Gonna have to help me out, here. I'm stupid, you have to spell it out.”

Ogata placed a hand on Sugimoto's sternum. Stationary, not inquisitive, yet, but something he couldn't ignore. Sugimoto knew he really ought to push it away, and yet—“I’m saying we can stand here talking and get caught, or you can let me suck you off and then go back to pretending you don't know what you've been doing all this time.”

Sugimoto tried to play it cool, but he was pretty sure his eyebrows shot up his head like they'd come unattached from his face. “You want to—”

Ogata blinked at him, and wasn’t he talented, huh, how many guys could make you want to deck them so hard with just their eyelids? “Don't tell me you don't know what that is, Sugimoto. I don't care if you're that kind of guy or not, you've made it that far—haven't you?”

“Of course I have,” Sugimoto lied, and pushed blithely forth into the next thing to say. “We're going to get in so much shit.”

“I'd hate to get in trouble for something I haven't done.” Ogata's hand was moving south, now, slipping under Sugimoto's jacket buttons to his shirt and then his stomach. The frigid fingers on his belly made Sugimoto gasp under his breath, though he tried to make sure it was quiet. You’d think he’d have gotten used to the cold by now. “This kind of thing happens all the time. And they can't do anything about it if we don't get caught.”

“Well, if you've made up your mind,” Sugimoto replied, and it came out rougher than he'd thought. His own voice sounded sandpapered.

A row of birds—it was impossible to tell crow from gull at this distance—rested on the barricades not far from where the two of them stood. A creeping feeling slid down Sugimoto's spine at the thought any living thing would witness what was about to happen. As if they’d care.

There was no one human around. It couldn't be actually, literally true, but it felt true, just for that moment. Ogata was looking at him with his blank stare. There was something about that stare that made his skin crawl, like Ogata had already looked through him and picked up everything he needed to know, like he’d measured Sugimoto up and found him wanting in something. Sugimoto was seized by a surge of remembrance: he'd watched Ogata shoot a Russian in the head across the field from 400 yards without leaving the trench. No one else Sugimoto knew could make that kind of shot. Ogata had just slung his rifle down by the swing strap, lined up, and fired, and the look in his eye had been exactly the same as it was now.

They stood close enough together he could make out the pores on Ogata's skin. This close, Sugimoto had to tip his head down to look Ogata in the eye, but it didn’t make him feel like the one with the upper hand. Ogata stood up on his tiptoes and pressed against him. Sugimoto could feel his smile against his skin before Ogata licked a stripe up the side of his neck and begun to unfasten the clasps of his trousers with quick fingers.

“Be quiet, now,” Ogata rumbled into his ear, and then he was crouching down to waist-height, pulling Sugimoto out of his underclothes and gnawing away at the inside corner of his hip. Sugimoto's eyes flew open. It was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen, Ogata kneeling in front of him with something that could only be described as hunger on his face and Sugimoto's cock in his hand, and his body was reacting even if his mind was still screaming to get out of there while he still could and pretend none of this ever happened. No, as far as some parts of him were concerned, he liked it, way too much.

It started out hot and wet and just got hotter and wetter. Maybe part of that was how cold it was outside, it was hard to tell. Ogata’s mouth was slippery, his lips swollen, it was so fucked up, Sugimoto hadn’t realized he could even look like that—and what the hell was Sugimoto even doing, here, because he sure wasn’t doing anything to stop it. It was all fucked up, everything about it. It made no sense and he wanted more of it, more of everything, from the way his blood ran under his skin like it was going to burst to the rightness of stubble scratching across his inner thigh.

Ogata, damn him, didn’t have the decency to look away, which would let Sugimoto pretend they weren’t exactly who they were doing exactly what they were; instead, he maintained eye contact, hardly blinking, his eyes watering a little at the corners.

“Shit,” Sugimoto whispered, and then bit down on his own fist. This was not supposed to happen but he saw it coming anyway, and it didn’t feel bad, felt way too good, actually, he just had no idea how anything was supposed to go back to normal after this. He’d be lining up for morning inspections and one of the officers, Sergeant Tsukishima or, goddamnit, Second Lieutenant Hanazawa with his guileless look and pursed lips would stop in front of Sugimoto like they could smell it on him and then everyone would know what they’d done, that he’d screwed around, been fraternizing, and not just with anyone but Ogata, who was somewhere between a discipline case and an officers’ pet: the worst of both worlds. That’s how to prove that transferring him into the unit instead of letting himself get demoted and thrown into the meat grinder with the rest of the 1st was a good idea, alright.

He wished he could say that it wasn’t what he’d wanted, that he hadn’t been goading Ogata into it, but Ogata was right. The two of them had been circlng around each other like this since they met. The back of his mind filed away, well, now you know he follows through on his threats, but most of him was too busy trying not to come his brains out immediately and make it even more obvious that he’d been lying when he said he’d done this before.

Ogata was mean about it, too, show-offy, doing things he didn’t need to, and he wouldn’t stop looking at him, and Sugimoto grabbed at his shoulder, tried to push him off, whispering under his breath, “Stop it, I’m going to—I can’t—” and Ogata just laughed at him like it was funny without taking his mouth off him, so it sent vibrations up Sugimoto’s spine, enough to make his toes curl.

It was all over pretty quickly after that. They had places to be; they were going to be missed soon, and Sugimoto watched Ogata spit come out on the ground next to him with way more flourish than he needed to. He wracked his brain for what to do next, but the thoughts were sliding around inside his head. Ogata was jerking himself with his trousers barely undone, like he couldn’t take the time to push them off properly, and Sugimoto was torn between offering to help and not wanting to get made fun of for not knowing how these things were supposed to go. Besides, the world around him still felt like it was spinning. It was enough of an effort to stay standing up without swaying.

He wasn’t sure how much longer it took before Ogata stood up, too, looking mostly like he hadn’t just sucked somebody off in the dirt and then got off to it. Ogata stuck out his hand, and Sugimoto just stared at it. There was no way he wanted Sugimoto to hold it, he could figure out that much. Ogata blinked at him like he thought Sugimoto was an idiot, but what was new, and said, “We’ve got the rest of those to get through, and I’m hungry. Come on.”

“Oh, right,” Sugimoto said, and shook his head once before bending down to pick up the rest of the boards so they could get back to work. It was easy to pretend nothing had happened as long as he didn’t look Ogata in the eye.

They made their slow way down the embankment until the trench ran up against a dead end. The sun was midday-high, and as they made their way back to the mess tent they passed Noma and Okada, who were still hammering away. Sugimoto got a cordial nod from Okada, and neither of them spared he nor Ogata anything he’d call a suspicious look as they walked past, but he still felt an uneasy shiver run down his spine. If Ogata was concerned about it, he didn’t show it, but Sugimoto was realizing more strongly than ever not to trust what Ogata did or did not show on his face.