Work Text:
Jo is sketching again. Yuma hears him before he sees him—sounds thread-thin and bone-hollow, as if some bastard lullaby woven from static and solder. He steps past the bent remnants of a transport chassis, careful not to kick loose the charge traps scattered in the dust. Jo is there, crouched beside an abandoned comp panel, its polyglass cracked like eggshell. Not just loitering. Drawing—fingers moving against the panel with quiet, ghostly surety.
The sketch is precise, fluid: two figures, kneeling face to face. One places their hand on the other’s jaw, eyes closed. The creases at the corners of a smile. The slant of lashes. The outline of collarbones.
“You’re supposed to be offline,” Yuma says, voice low.
Jo doesn’t startle. Just finishes the line, flicks his eyes up. “The sun woke me.”
“It’s not sunrise yet.”
Jo tilts his head, thoughtful. “The light’s different without the moon. I don’t think my biosensors will ever adjust.”
His voice is soft, not quite flat. Yuma hates how human it sounds.
Since the Moonfall, nothing has stayed the same. The tides stilled. Seasons collapsed into each other like broken code. Gravity started forgetting itself. Night is too dark. Day too long. The Earth, unmooned, turned uncanny. And in the scramble to survive its failure, the necrotechnocrats made a decision: let the dead inherit the earth. Let them labor where living flesh could not endure.
Jo, somehow, hadn’t forgotten.
Yuma squats beside him. Dust grits beneath his boots. The core reader on his belt gives a stuttering chirp—Jo’s signal, flickering, unstable. He should’ve pulled it days ago. Unit 454-KUR4. Priority dismantle. High-yield necrotech core, borderline custom-grade. Could’ve paid off two contracts, maybe three. Instead, he’s here. Watching a corpse draw love on shattered tech.
Jo lifts the panel gently, holds it toward him. “I think they knew each other,” he says. “In life.”
Yuma tugs his hood up, pulls on his mask. The sun is beginning to rise—harsh yellowhaze. Shadows are too long now. Light comes in like error.
“It’s time we move,” Yuma says.
Jo nods. Doesn’t rise immediately. Only stares into the sketch, the way one stares into a well and wonders what might be looking back.
The wind shifts. Something grinds in the distant ash fields. Yuma watches Jo’s hand, still poised over the drawing, as though waiting for permission to finish.
---
The desert was once a sea.
That’s what the old maps say, their plastic laminate curled at the corners like burnt skin. Yuma carries one rolled tight in his pack. The idea that someone once charted this place with confidence feels like a kind of myth worth believing in.
Now the ground hisses with heat. When he walks, the sand resists his boots, then swallows every trace he leaves behind. The wind speaks in clicks and high whines, passing through ribbed metal hulls half-buried like fossils. Some vessels belonged to the old trade fleets. Others—the jagged, spined ones—are relics of war.
He crouches beside a corroded stack of necrodrives wired into a long-dead engine coil. Inside the casing, something twitches. A hand, skeletal but wrapped in dermal mesh, reaches out like it might remember how to plead. The serf it’s attached to is fused into the wreckage, half of its spine melted into the metal, its eyes still lit with weak, red pulse. A low hum murmurs from its chest cavity, but it doesn’t speak.
Low-grade core. Expired. Not worth extracting.
Yuma marks it on his scanpad anyway. Someone might want the copper.
Further along the ridge, he finds a newer work unit. Sleek casing, intact jaw. Legs torn off, the torso dragging slow circles in the dust. It hisses when Yuma approaches, a defensive loop caught in its behavioral script. He flips it with his boot. The core housing is visible—a bright blue flickers under a fractured plate.
B-tier, maybe. He could make this work. But the energy signature is weak. Better to let it run dry out here than risk the backlash. Cores degrade in strange ways. Some make you forget. Some make you remember too much.
He pockets a loose charger ring and turns back toward camp.
—
Jo is lying down when he arrives. Not asleep—he doesn’t sleep—but arranged as if he might. His head is turned toward the dying sun, face inert. Peaceful, if you didn’t know better. The comp panel sits beside him, sketch half-finished. New lines: the same two figures from before, now standing. One with hands outstretched. The other blurred into indistinct shapes, fading.
Yuma drops his pack and sinks beside him. The warmth from the walk still clings to his shoulders, but the air cools quickly here. Long nights, longer shadows.
“You found something?” Jo asks, without looking.
“Nothing much of use.”
“Still—” Jo closes his eyes, opens them again. “You always seem different when you come back.”
“Less annoyed?”
“More tired.”
Yuma doesn’t reply.
Instead, he pulls off his gloves and checks the status scanner. Jo’s signal flickers again. That core should’ve gone out a year ago. It’s a mystery what keeps him running.
He watches Jo’s chest, where the fabric doesn’t rise or fall. The outline of his sternum presses sharp through his shirt. No breath. Not even an illusion of it.
The first night, they lay back to back. Yuma stared into the dark, listening for trespassers, Jo’s silence louder than any snore might have been.
The second night, Jo shifted closer. Not touching. Just near. His hand hovered at Yuma’s shoulder like an unfinished sentence.
The third night, his palm rested flat against Yuma’s chest. Still. Cool. Intent.
“You don’t breathe,” Yuma had said into the dark.
“I’d like to remember what it’s like,” Jo had replied.
Tonight, Jo inches closer before the light’s even gone. His head beside Yuma’s, hand drifting again to its place. There’s no heat in it, but the weight is real.
Yuma exhales, slow.
Since the Moonfall, no anchor hangs above them.
“You know I was sent to harvest you.”
Jo doesn’t flinch. “I figured.”
“Special requisition. Said you had a legacy core. Something from the pre-Fall research lines. Didn’t tell me you could draw. Or think.”
“They wouldn’t.”
“I was supposed to repurpose you. Salvage the core for another serf. Fresh meat. One of those hauling rigs up near the northern spine of the world.” His voice is flat.
Jo’s hand lifts from his chest. Just a little.
“Then why didn’t you?”
Yuma doesn’t answer right away.
“I’m not sure myself.”
Jo turns his face toward him, eyes open.
Their glow is faint, like a lantern choked on its last breath. But he looks at Yuma—really looks.
“I remember what it’s like to be brought back,” he says softly. “When they put me under, it felt like—like falling asleep with all the dreams torn out. In that way, it’s really just the falling part, over and over.”
Yuma’s mouth goes dry. “Jo—”
Jo lifts his hand again, places it back where it was. Firm, this time. A gesture of offering.
“Come take my soul,” he says, voice steady. “It’s all I have left.”
Yuma stares at the ceiling of sky. The stars don’t blink. The wind has gone still.
His heart makes a tight, slow thud under Jo’s palm.
“I don’t want it,” Yuma says. “Not if it’s all you have.”
They lie like that for a long time—human and revenant, dream and refusal, hand to chest.
Later, when sleep finally comes for Yuma, he doesn’t notice that Jo’s hand never leaves him.
---
The raid comes on the twentieth dusk.
No sound at first—only the brittle snap of boneflags in the wind.
Then motion.
Too fast. Too coordinated for carrion. Too quiet for kin.
Boneyarders.
Yuma’s breath seizes. He lunges for the arc whip at his thigh, thumb grazing the ignition node—
Then something clamps around his ankle. Jointed like a crab’s claw, but wrapped in skin. Human once.
He kicks hard. The boot connects with a wet pop. Something gives.
Another shadow veers from the ridge—hooks glinting, body strung with vertebrae etched in rust.
They don’t speak. They don’t need to.
Their hunger is eloquent enough.
The arc whip flares, spitting blue heat—
But there’s no time to find rhythm. One closes in, ossified blade raised.
Yuma would be a goner but—
Jo slams in from nowhere.
Not fast. Not graceful.
He lands between them with a sound like metal and bone remembering impact.
His shoulder takes the blade—splits through the synth graft, sparks flailing into the dirt. He doesn’t stop.
Jo drives his arm into the boneyarder’s chest. The thing folds like wet fabric.
Another lunges from behind. Jo pivots—spine arcing like a bridge—and smashes it against the rock wall.
Yuma scrambles upright, whip buzzing.
He swings—catches a third boneyarder across the face.
It doesn’t bleed. Just hisses and stumbles sideways, more machine than man.
He kicks again, breath ragged, a snarl rising unbidden in his throat.
The boneyarders vanish over the ridge, dragging their fallen like meat.
Silence falls like ash.
Yuma drops to his knees.
Jo slumps beside him, one arm cracked open to circuitry, sparks fizzing along the tear. The scent of scorched wire curls into the air.
“You okay?” Yuma asks, voice cracking.
Jo lifts his head. One eye flickers, stabilizes. “Functionality: compromised but stable.”
Yuma exhales hard. “That’s not what I asked.”
Jo blinks once, slow. “I couldn’t let them get you.”
Yuma nods, barely. “I’m alive, ain’t I?”
Jo leans back, propping himself on one elbow. His arm twitches—misfiring circuits—but his gaze doesn’t drift.
“In that moment, I remembered something,” he says.
Yuma swallows. “What?”
Jo’s voice is quiet, steady. “What it’s like—having someone worth protecting.”
Yuma doesn’t speak.
Jo reaches toward him. His hand is bloodless, bone-pale, clean despite the wreckage.
Not seeking thanks. Just confirmation.
Yuma grips it.
Not warm. Not alive.
And in the failing light, with no moon to watch, he feels something move between them—
Not heat, but a metaphysical warmth, tethered to will.
---
Later, Yuma drags Jo’s body back to the tent.
He doesn’t feel the weight—only the shape of absence. One foot drags. An arm dangles. Jo’s head tilts too far back, his eyes still wide but seeing nothing. Dust gathers in his lashes.
Yuma lays him down gently, like he might bruise.
Outside, the wind combs through the wrecks. Salt clings to the air like ash.
Inside, Yuma lights the old lantern—the one that smells of boiled copper. Its glow doesn’t reach far, but it softens the shadows. Makes them familiar. Like rooms before the Fall.
He unzips Jo’s jacket. Beneath the collarbone lies the access panel, disguised beneath a patch of skin-toned synth. Yuma slices it open with a trembling blade, whispering the old prayers—the ones the necroengineers muttered when no one else was listening.
“Guide the spark. Bind what clings. Let return be possible.”
He bypasses every fail-safe. Opens Jo up.
His hands move too fast, too angry. Sparks lick his knuckles. He doesn’t stop.
The core is worse than he feared. The housing’s collapsed in places. The glow is still there—faint, flickering.
Still, he tries.
Jo’s chest jerks once. Fingers twitch.
Then stillness.
Yuma leans in, ear to that empty cavity in Jo’s chest, pressing into the hollowness where breath might have once lived. His face rests there, against synth and silence, listening.
He looks through the window of his tent, into the void in the sky where a moon used to hang, Yuma whispers—
“Let him come home.”
A pause. Then—
A shift. Small. Impossible.
Jo’s hand rises. Not far. Not steady. It finds Yuma’s hair, trembles there, then stills—fingers curled, as if remembering how to hold.
Yuma closes his eyes.
Outside, the desert exhales. The wrecks creak. Far off, kinetic necroserfs still plow earth that will never again bear fruit.
But inside the tent, beneath the remnants of war and the weight of failed futures, one man holds another who no longer breathes—but stays.