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He kissed like heaven, so of course Juno Steel didn’t deserve it. His lips were thin and soft and mostly dry, even when he put his tongue inside Juno’s mouth. He kissed like he could find every star in the universe behind Juno’s teeth, and that scared Juno. It made him want to close his lips and mumble his apologies until Nureyev understood.
Nureyev kissed like heaven, and as long as Juno remembered it was temporary, he could kiss back.
Juno gave himself the night before he began the process of untangling his limbs from Nureyev’s. He let himself believe he believed in love. But he couldn’t let heaven be a thing he could touch.
And even though the hand that touched his hip as he was leaving sent a shiver through him, even though the voice that called his name sounded was sweet as the calm after a sandstorm, he slipped on his jacket and left the keycard where Nureyev could find it and closed the door behind him.
He caught a cab to the office. While the seat shuddered across poorly kept asphalt, he kept his eyes on the city, on the billboards and neon restaurant signs and windows lit by people who didn’t know he’s there. His city. His broken, beautiful goddamn city. The only home he’d ever known. The only home deserved.
The city was cold and he fumbled to unlock the front door. Inside, he left the lights off, dropped the keys on his desk, and sat backwards on his office chair. He could still feel Nureyev’s body, could still feel the shudder that went through him when Nureyev said love.
All this talk of love, and Juno still ended up right where he started, whiskey in his glass, whiskey in his throat, his body hurtling through space and no body to keep it warm. Regret hot in his mouth as the buzz kicked in.
It was the only thing to do.
Rita woke him the next morning. He was on the old couch in the lobby, his coat sliding off his hip. The day was so bright he threw his hands over his eyes. His body just felt like a body, heavy and solid, and the shame in his throat felt just like bile. He flexed his fingers, testing his muscles.
“I thought you were dead,” Rita was saying. “You disappeared for two whole weeks and then that voicemail, and you come back with your whole face wrapped up and—and it looks really bad, boss. Tell me you’re okay.”
Juno looked at her until he couldn’t, her eyes as bright as the sun and just as searing. It was still hard to believe anyone thought about him when he wasn’t in the room.
Rising, he pulled his sweater from where it stuck to his skin. He’d fallen asleep in his shoes, and his legs felt heavy. He went into the kitchen to put the coffee pot on.
In a small voice, Rita said, “You are okay, right?”
The kitchen was cold and the tension in Juno’s body wasn’t leaving.
“I didn’t mean to scare you, Rita,” Juno said at last. But he didn’t know if he was okay.
Juno is ten, listening through the thin doors of their apartment while Ma has her way with one of her weekend friends. Benten has some awful, discordant song on repeat and is swaying to it in the center of the room, his hands over his ears. He doesn’t care if anyone hears him. If anyone knocks on the door half-dressed and screams. But Juno can make anything an earplug without thought for the consequences.
Benten is dancing alone in a quiet house late into the night, so Juno listens for the sound of doors closing. Ma’s voice a hoarse whisper, her companion’s low and loud as a cracked roof. Soon the shouting will start, the Get out and never come backs. The I thought you were different, I thought you could be different for me.
There’s no different, Juno thinks, and is embarrassed for adults who don’t know that yet.
All through adolescence, he listens to his mother deliver her ultimatums, her life lessons, promises that slide like water into Juno’s ears and settle there. He turns his boyfriends to plaza fountains, his girlfriends to shattered glass. He lets his brother chase his crushes and learns by the end of junior high to keep his heart to himself. The pining is easier than the shouting matches, the cruel things he says without thinking, or after thinking too much, and eats himself up about afterward.
You’re a goddamn asshole, I should never have trusted you, you were like this from the start.
Yeah, that’s right, he says, because there’s a comfort in starting a fight. The only love he deserves is the kind that turns on him.
And always he comes home. He doesn’t cry. Always he is left with himself, with his family, with the space in between. His brother’s jokes, his brother’s close calls, his brother’s enthusiastic voice that Juno didn’t know he should be memorizing.
His mother is saying, People like you and I, my sweetheart, my little monster, we don’t get good things. We don’t get people who stay. Sure, for a moment we’ll think it’s real, we think it’s gonna last. We give too much of ourselves but we’re too much for anyone to handle. I know you better than anyone. You’re like me. I know.
What about us, me and Ben? Juno wants to say. Aren’t we here? Aren’t we permanent?
He doesn’t say it. He is planning for a future she has no part in—the police academy and an apartment outside of Oldtown and a new comms. And if not that, dropping out and getting as far away as he can before he crashes and burns. The world is big and the future is a tunnel he is choosing where to dismantle. The light pouring in, warm and heavy. Hands he hasn’t recognized since the single digits.
She doesn’t have to know a thing about it.
Ma saying, still, So don’t you start thinking you deserve them. The world comes hungry for us and spits us out dead when it’s done, and that’s the whole of it.
And he knows. He knows. He bites his heart in two before anyone else can find where he’s hidden it, and when the blood runs down his chin, his mother laughs.
The boy you are always protecting, Juno, you don’t deserve him either.
His sun-touched face. His sun-bright eyes. His endless goddamn hope. Everything’s so stupid. One day you’ll understand, only I wish you would understand now.
Spare the rest of us a lot of trouble.
There was a war and it had always been going on. Every boarded-up factory spoke of it; every gaunt, jobless face. For months on end Oldtown smelled of smoke and coal and the scorched aftertaste of laser fire.
Hyperion was lucky. That’s what all the newscasters said when Juno crept into the living room after bedtime. He wanted to see what his mother was watching after his eyes closed. He stood shadowed in the doorway and listened. There were no battles out in the desert, no food shortages in the richest districts, soldiers shipped off-planet, out of the whole damn solar system, uniforms every Oldtown child knew. How many of Juno’s classmates went on to serve just to get out of this shithole of a city?
He didn’t know, because he forgot all their faces the moment he graduated.
In the books Juno read half of before growing bored, gunfire and the rain of shells struck like a rite of passage. But his mother walked him and his brother past pawn shops and gun shops and talked about an old friend who taught her how to shoot. She never went in, but the way she slowed to gawk through the barred windows put Juno in mind of the prison bars his mother swore he would end up behind.
The truth was scarier than anything Juno had ever seen in writing.
The truth was he didn’t know how long she’d had it. He’d worn his holster when he visited his brother, but he never expected it.
But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Really, it was just the inevitable. Sleek and black there in her hands and as dazzling as a jewel. Her fingerprints all over it. Diamonds come in all shades.
Every war he ever fought ended with his body in the sand. The beginning and the end. The taste of it at the bottom of every bottle. The holster dropped on his bedside table.
Mostly the war had his own eyes and his own name, and mostly he wasn’t equipped to fight it. He didn’t have the right weapons, or the right words, or the presence of mind not to roll over and show it his belly because it was easier to have nowhere to climb. He dreamt of pulling the trigger. His mother armed, dangling the keys inches above his hand, laughing. All night long, that laugh, and no one left to hear it.
The past leaves its landmines for the unsuspecting future. It preps every familiar room with tripwires, and Juno is still untangling them from his ankles. Every death threat still thrumming through his blood, every promise.
You’re next, Juno Steel. Yeah, yeah. Always has been.
There are too many years in Nureyev’s life that Juno doesn’t know and probably never will. Even now he is afraid to ask. He opens his mouth and his words catch in his throat. How can he say, I’ve seen the war in you and I want to know if you’ve ever gotten it out when he only knows of it secondhand? Nureyev has dark, hollow eyes and eats with an animal ferocity. He downloads books about architecture and war strategy onto his comms and reads with his legs tucked up and shoulders tense. He kisses Juno’s neck in public. He lets his personas, one by one, in the quiet of their bedroom, fade away.
And bit by bit, Juno learns him. His tells; his quirks; his hesitations; his shoulders too tense, always, no matter how many times Juno kisses them.
And there are too many locked doors inside Juno that Nureyev is not asking for the keys to. He doesn’t know why, but it makes him sad. Somehow, he expected this would be different. Someone should ask him these questions, he thinks. Someone should let him say, This is what I did, this is how I did it.
A hand not as dangerous as his holding out the key like it meant nothing.
Juno doesn’t ask questions either. Their scars might be incompatible, and then where would all this work go? The hungry hollows in both of them. The hooded eyes, the exhaustion lines, the crow’s feet. The victories and the defeats that lie unspoken beneath every tongue. He is not alone in this. He is not the only one here who wears his past like armor.
And he is trying to let it go.
There are good days and bad days on the Carte Blanche. The ship is too small, for one. The absence of sun gets to him, keeps his eyelids heavy and his head cloudy. Some days he snarls so much before breakfast that he shuts himself in his room and declines all offers of conversation, and sometimes he goes down to the garage and sits in the acrid mechanical stink until Jet enters with some task Juno doesn’t understand, and sometimes, if that old anger swells like a sandstorm in him, he locks himself in the makeshift shooting range and pulls the trigger enough times to make his arm lock up.
No one thinks any less of you for having bad days, Buddy tells him, but largely he doesn’t feel he has a right to them. Because on the worst days he snaps at Nureyev, all vicious, a thing he forces himself to control. He bites his own hands to keep himself quiet.
He misses it, sometimes. The easy comfort of a bottle, of a dark year, of a death threat that thrilled more than terrified him. Of his voice bitter and vitriolic as he could make it, his voice tearing through the world, his last line of defense.
He misses it, but when he has thoughts like these, he quiets them as best he can. He holds them in his mouth, at least, and doesn’t speak them to anyone. This is his burden, his project, his chance.
He can get through this.
This is how it went, he tells his lover, and his teeth turn into diamonds. Or maybe this: I want to tell you the truth.
You don’t have to. You don’t have to.
Already the words slip around him like the dark mass of space outside. He keeps the shades low, even though there is no one to see him.
Every part of me comes back to the moment where the door creaked open, unlocked. Someone was waiting for me, but the apartment was empty. It was so empty there wasn’t enough air to breathe.
It was easier when his mind could slip into someone else’s, but even then, he couldn’t make it go the other way.
He walked into that room and it was darker than any he had ever known, and most of his life he slid from one dark place to another. He shined flashlights. He kept the bathroom light off while he brushed his teeth for months, while the mirror showed a face that wasn’t his. He grew his hair out.
The rest of his years he spent clawing at the door, trying to break free. But the key had already fallen from his hand.
This is what my war looks like, he says. It’s not glamorous, or grand, but the whole city seemed to remember. And I am never going to let him go. Closure is a goddamn lie.
No war is glamorous, says Nureyev.
Once upon a time there was a pair of twins with a mother whose eyes spilled darkness across every room she walked into—one who inherited nothing of her, and one who inherited everything. They did not resent each other for it, though they could have, and when her dark fell across them, they held each other’s hands and pushed through. They scraped the well of her love. They fell into it. And when the dark grew too heavy to breathe through, there wasn’t enough air for both of them to get out.
Or maybe this: Once upon a time there was an orphan and the city that raised him looked to the sky with open hands and thought it could hold light itself. His planet shipped soldiers off in droves. Bombs crashed through the night like lightning. Once hunger was all he knew, once fear, and when a man who knew how to spin minds like wool brought him to comfort so mild and so sweet it felt like salvation, there was no end to his debt.
These are each their own form of cruelty.
Make it a story, with teeth as sharp as fairy tales. Dig its canines into his hands. All the scars he doesn’t show, scratches on his ribs and keloids on his shoulders and burns all over from stun carts discharged point-blank. In the mirror his face grows less and less like his own and more like a canvas for scar tissue. Red, and then pale, and then finally settling against the backdrop of his skin.
Like proof that he was here. That he was his own, finally; like his name had no hold over him.
It was proof that every day took him farther away from Benten. His face grew more and more haggard, and he didn’t know when it happened, or how old he was. It was like it had always been this way: he was washing his face in the mirror and when he looked up, he didn’t see Benten at all. Just an amalgamation of parts in all the wrong places. Squinting through his sleep, his eyes flat and all his own. Not the second death but the fiftieth, the five-hundredth. Every inch of loss could be a city, populated by its own decades-old ghosts. The shape of his hands in the light. The shape of all this forgetting.
Tell me about the war when you’re ready, he is telling his lover. I want to get to know you the right way.
His lover kisses his chest and touches his scars and doesn’t say a word. His hair falls over Juno and blocks his face, and his teeth scrape the skin.
Do I have to? asks his lover, and love is not so tremulous that he catastrophizes.
Quickly he says, No. You’re right, of course. I’m sorry.
Don’t be.
It is a lesson Juno is learning, apology.
And here is what Peter Nureyev tells him, months later: You have wars enough of your own. I shouldn’t burden you with mine.
Sure, I have my own, says Juno. But I chose to fight in them.
All of them?
He dreams about hands reaching through every dark, reaching for him. Every year he was alive was another year he shouldn’t be. Even now it’s hard to shake those thoughts, to reroute them into something he can brush aside. Or live with, at least.
I guess not. But I chose to fight. Did it hurt like hell? Of course. Does it still? Yeah, but I could have laid down and died. That has to count for something.
And he says, Give me some of yours. I know a thing or two about minefields.
Sometimes he is outside of the person he is becoming. Sometimes he can’t see the shape of himself at all. Sometimes when Nureyev looks at him, when anyone in this family he calls his looks, he doesn’t know what they see. All of them knew him before and some of them traveled to the end of the world with him, and sometimes, still, it scares him.
He is learning, slowly, to sit with the fear. To let himself feel it without bolting, without putting his hand on a gun. To be the person he was and the person he is and the person he is becoming, to give each of them space to breathe inside his chest.
And yes, sometimes it is easier to be the person he used to be, abrasive and biting and cruel, because the walls we build inside of us are as hard to raze as to build. But he is learning, too, to pull himself back from the dark. To trust himself to do it. To fight like hell.
Of course Juno doesn’t deserve it. And of course he catches the thought between his teeth before he finds a way to say it aloud.
Forgiveness. Second chances. The space to explain himself and be heard. He has to tell himself, through that whole first conversation aboard the Carte Blanche, that he is allowed to give his side of the story, so long as he doesn’t expect anything in return.
He deserves to purchase gifts for Nureyev on planets they dock at, deserves Nureyev’s startled smiles when he receives them. He reminds himself several times a day, every time his breath catches in his throat, every time that old, heavy fear settles in his spine.
Used to be the only love he thought he deserved was the kind that turned on him, and he has to remind himself, every day, that Peter Nureyev will stay. Because for the first time, Juno is someone worth sticking around for.
Tell me about the war.
I was a child. I was just a child.
As he drifts off to sleep, hands on his chest, his head tucked beneath another’s. He is safe here. Still, he has to remind himself he is safe, this miracle he never believed would be granted. Lips against the crown of his head, his hairline, his eyes sliding open and closed.
He deserves this. He deserves this, and every promise it holds. Every soft touch that means, Stay.
Tell me about the war. Someone is saying this, but on the precipice of sleep there is no differentiation.
Where could I start?
One day you go back far enough in your memories there’s nothing that comes before it. What if it started then?
I got all this way thinking I was heartless.
He didn’t make the world he left me with, but he left me with it all the same.
Try again. Tell me when you’re ready.
The sweetest gift either of them have been given. Time and space.
I’ll tell you mine.
And so, when he’s ready, Juno says, I choose to live.
Lips against his hairline. Hands he trusts not to crush him.
Every day. Every miserable, beautiful day, I wake up and I live. I am the weapon and the victory and the fool caught in the middle, but it’s my choice, and if I have to fight to keep making this same choice for the rest of my life, I will. What about you?
The man in his bed stiffens. His hands still against the back of Juno’s neck.
Living’s a complicated task.
Does he say that? And does Juno say, I could feel it on you?
Juno says, But you’re doing it.
For better or for worse.
For better. Tipping up his head to kiss Nureyev’s jaw. Always for better.