The Darkness Outside Us

Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Intimacy, not knowledge. Intimacy, not power.


I will unravel here.


I am in a waiting room without end, without location, without time or place. If I go outside, I die before I get any answers. I exist only in a theoretical way, like a point on a coordinate plane. I am the simulation.

We’re in a vast empty stretch of dead sea. There’s nothing around for light-years and light-years.

Ambrose, “first sight” love is when you meet someone who accords with your childhood lessons, learned from your parents, of what you think love should look like.

Nowhere is truly empty. The thought makes me feel lavishly alone. Somehow, space is so deeply melancholy that it’s not at all sad, like a note so low it ceases to sound. Even my sorrow about my insignificance feels insignificant.

He’s lying out on the ground, right here in the blind room, on his side, his head propped up in his palm. He pats the floor in front of him.
“Do you mean . . . a cuddle?” I ask, face hot.
He blanches. “That’s not what we would have called it back in training.”
I roll my eyes. “This was called, what, ‘tough-man companion time’?”
He laughs. “Not so far from that, actually.”

“We’ll live,” Kodiak says as he pulls himself out of the water, lying on his side and wiping water from his thick hair. “We’ll get cancer in our twenties, but we’ll survive at least until then.”
“Was that a joke?” I ask, arranging myself next to him and wringing out the hem of my shirt.
“Yes. It was a joke, and also it was true. It is a Dimokratía kind of joke.”

Maybe I never was Ambrose the Great. Maybe I was just Ambrose the Privileged.

In Fédération, we pride ourselves on having moved far beyond the prejudices of the past. I nearly got a skinprint between my pecs saying Labels are the Root of Violence. But it’s like the Dimokratíans are still living in the twenty-first century. Backward, bigoted, homophobic, transphobic. Idiots.

“Sibling rivalry stuff,” I say. I would never tell this brute, but the truth is that Minerva is both my greatest rival and the most important love in my life.