John Louis
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Short Story 2: “A Place to Call Our Own” [W4]
🕑 Added 2025-09-27 22:18:38 +0000 UTC[Ulysses/Ulyssa and Male Whiskey]
I so desperately wanted to leave Sahara.
It was almost feverish. Whenever I sat and looked up, and I had Whiskey at my side, I’d imagine the stars and I’d imagine us getting the hell off of this damnable world. It was terrible. It made me feel almost sick to my stomach.
Though, of course, the boy with me wasn’t “Whiskey-Four” yet. He wouldn't be for about two more decades. He was just a kid, then, a kid with a name that was way too complicated for a little street urchin.
We weren’t uncommon. None of us were. We spent our days in the bottom ten layers of the city. The Uvarov Headquarters–or at least, the office that would eventually become it–was in the upper ten. Hundreds of floors separated us. The irony is goddamn palpable to me now. Had I’d known how life would turn, maybe I would’ve spared myself the trouble and dragged my child-self up there and bombed it earlier.
That’d leave Whiskey alone, though. And I couldn’t do that. Not just out of loyalty or whatever bastardized form of love we had then, but for very pragmatic reasons. It was hard to survive in Sahara alone.
I remember we slept in the backroom of an abandoned storage facility that had effectively become a homeless encampment. We slept surrounded by people–and that was actually arguably worse. But it was a warm place, a known place. It was hard to leave that. The city was so terribly cold. Concrete. Steel. Glass. So anything where the heating still worked, sapping off the power grid, was valuable.
The facility was huge, but most of it wasn’t accessible. The walls were thirty feet high, easily, and the metal beams supporting them must’ve rusted away. It collapsed inward and blocked many of the hallways. Other rooms were just colloquially known to be way too dangerous.
It’s where being a kid helped. We were like spider monkeys. We could clamber up and down the debris, squeeze into the little spots. In the half-sunken remains of a century-old employee bathroom, we made ourselves a safe box. If you climbed onto the top of the urinal and pushed up the rotting ceiling tile, you could slide right into the ventilation system, the metal of which was intact enough for a seven year old.
It was our first home–Whiskey and I. We put our things in there. The money, the food we stole or begged for. It was a place that was ours, and that was what made it special. We had nothing. We were specks of dust. We were little kids surrounded by the poor and the addicted.
I wanted a place like this one, but away. A little cozy corner for the both of us. Some place on a distant world with a bright red sun and a soft blanket and a pillow. I didn’t even know what stars looked like, but I imagined they’d be warm.
It didn’t take long for some fucker to ruin the only thing we had.
I was gone for most of the day. Whiskey had a cold, so I went up a level to the pharmacy to get him some medicine. The local clerk there was a kind young guy, a teenager maybe, and he didn’t care a whole lot about making me pay. I went up and asked for cold medicine and he gave me a whole bag of chewable tablets (neither of us could swallow pills yet) and even a paper list of instructions–what to take and when.
I got lost heading back. That didn’t happen often. When it did, usually Whiskey was with me–but not this time. I took a few hours to get back to the warehouse. I slipped in through the front door and weaved between tents and gingerly stepped over legs. I found the hallway–the one on the left with the flickering light–and followed it. Then I found our bathroom; we marked it with a pen on the doorframe.
And when I walked inside, I saw a man standing there. My heart shot up into my chest. I was horrified–but even more than that, I was furious.
He heard me approach and spun around. He was unstable, rocking back and forth. His legs were jittery and rubbed his face and clenched his jaw.
“Here for your little boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What you got there?”
“Nothing.”
“Nah. Hand it over. Then show me where you put the rest of your stuff.” He held out his hand and emphasized his request with his fingers. “And the other kid, too. I know he’s in here. I heard him crying.”
I stamped my foot and pointed down the hall. “Get out!”
The man just snorted and walked right up to me. He towered over my seven-year-old self and tried to snatch the brown baggie of children’s ibuprofen from me. But I held it away and took a few steps back.
“Don’t be a little shit,” the man said. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“I do!” I shouted. And it wasn’t a bluff. If we had come across each other a decade later, I’d have killed him. I’d have shattered his skull against the sink. But as a kid, I had to settle for just running and screaming and battering him with useless fists.
He stepped toward me again, made another demand, and then Whiskey fell on top of him.
The boy dropped out of the ceiling, screaming like a banshee. Already, he embodied his future as an airborne infantryman, attacking from the sky. He landed on the man’s head and shoulders and immediately began to savage him.
It was goddamn ridiculous. The whole situation. He found himself being clawed in the face by a pair of seven-year-olds. And as tiny as we were–young and malnourished–the sheer surprise granted us a serious tactical advantage… for a few moments, at least. Then the man recovered his senses, and now absolutely livid, tore Whiskey from his head and threw him onto the ground. Then he turned to me, and with the full force of an adult, kicked me in the chest.
I broke a rib. I didn’t know it then, and I wouldn’t until the x-ray before our forced enrollment into the Academy. As I fell, I hit the back of my head against the concrete ground and got my first ever view of what stars looked like.
“Fucking psychopath kids! My fucking eyes!” He stumbled around, groaning and shouting curses. He braced himself on the sink and peered into the foggy mirror. And whatever he saw pissed him off. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
I heard Whiskey shout my name. His voice startled me to the present. Woozy and coughing, I raised my head and saw the boy running toward me, arm outstretched.
But then he got taken. The man seized him and lifted him up and Whiskey began to cry and thrash. He kicked off the wall and sent his captor stumbling around the bathroom. I tried to stand, I tried so hard, but with the concussion and the broken rib, I couldn’t. Every fiber of my being willed me to stand, but my body refused. I was left there, tears streaming down my face, watching the only boy I’d ever cared about being manhandled by a junkie.
The struggle stopped once the stranger slammed Whiskey–a goddamn child–against the wall of a bathroom stall.
“What you got up there, huh? Fucking kid. You got some candy up there? Or maybe some pills… you hiding pills up there?” He nodded to himself. “You got pills, don’t you. Keeping them from me.”
“I’ll murder you!” screamed Whiskey. We’d just learned that word, and he was eager to use it.
“What the fuck is going on in here?”
The sound of another adult’s voice startled the stranger. He tensed up and reflexively dropped Whiskey to the ground. As soon as the boy was free, he sprinted out of the bathroom and practically dove down to my side. He cradled my slumped body, then dropped me back down, horrified. He raised his fingers to his face and saw blood.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “No! No. You’re not okay. We need to go to a hospital.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I have the medicine for you.”
The new arrival had entered the bathroom, and the shouting inside intensified.
“I knew you were a fucking creep, Kent!”
“Creep? What the fuck are you saying?”
“Bro, you do not mess with kids. I don’t give fuck how–”
There was a crash. The attacker slammed his fist through the mirror. I could hear it, but the only thing I could see was Whiskey’s face. I reached out and threw my arms over his back.
“They got pills, dude!” he snarled. “I just know it. I’ve seen them climbing up and hiding shit up there. They must got pills.”
“They’re probably hiding fucking candy or something. Leave them alone, for Christ sake.” A pause. “You drunk or high right now?”
“Get out of my goddamn face.”
“Yeah? If I do are you gonna go messing with the kids again?”
“Fuck you!”
I could hear the struggle. Fighting here was vicious and unrefined. Whiskey and I would become artists in comparison. We learned lethality. Quickness. This was not the battle of two professionals; it was a savage street fight.
“We gotta go,” Whiskey insisted. He pulled on me and started dragging me away. “We gotta go, Yoolie.”
I made a few tries to stand, but couldn’t. Several more adults had now joined the scene, forming a semi-circle around the door. The fight inside continued. Nobody paid us any attention. Nobody stopped to help. Like two little insects, we slipped through the screen and flew away.
Whiskey dragged me. The noises grew more distant. I gripped him on the arm, and finally, on my fifth attempt, I managed to stand. Even then, I could understand the relief in his eyes.
“I’ll fucking shoot you, Kent!”
“Yeah? Yeah? Do it, asshole!”
I stopped.
“Wait!” I said, turning back toward the chaos. I could see the brown baggie on the ground. “I gotta get your medicine–”
A gunshot rang out.
I would grow very accustomed to that noise in time. It would become as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing. But then, it was so horrifying that I slipped backward and fell right into Whiskey’s child-arms. He screamed. I did, too. Someone inside did. The adults in the hallway trampled over each other to flee.
Whiskey pulled me upright, and stumbling and hobbling and tripping down the hall, we ran for the closest exit. He led the way; he slammed into the door with his shoulder, and adrenaline and speed carried us through it more than our weight. As he fled into the abandoned streets in the lowest levels of Sahara, another shot rang out.
We ran until we couldn’t, and then we fell. Fell onto the cold, hard concrete. Fell and slumped in an alleyway, bruised and bleeding.
I could feel consciousness beginning to slip away.
I didn’t realize it, but I was seriously injured. Had Whiskey not gone on to haul me to the hospital, I would’ve died there, no doubt. But he did. He dragged me all the way to the nearest hospital, and unwilling to let a kid die, they saved me. When I woke up a week later, we ran away together, but our flight was not long.
Soon, we’d be taken. Saved from the streets and delivered to the hell of the Academy, and then the Army.
Then the AIU.
In that alley, Whiskey cradled my body and held me so tight his nails dug into my back. We’d never return to our nook. The only thing we had now was what we always had.
“I won’t let you go, Yoolie,” he said.
I smiled at his words and passed into a dreamless sleep.
Comments
WarriorOmen
Oh my HEART..My little DARLINGS. I love how you can already tell how tight their bond is even when they're so little and don't know what they're doing. Forced to run on survival instinct and the only thing that'll keep them safe, each other.
John Louis
Let me know if you want a version with female pronouns as well. Nothing else in the story would change, so I didn't do it already.
