Chapter Text
You didn’t pretend anymore.
It wasn’t accidental — not the fifth time, not the eighth. You started wearing your boots again, even though Cairo was a city of sandals. Because you never knew how far you’d end up walking.
He’d say, “Same place?”
You’d shrug. “If we’re lucky.”
You never called it a meeting. It was always just being in the same place at the same time. Sometimes it was the rooftop of an old colonial hotel, long since gutted of tourists. You’d sit on the edge with your legs dangling, passing a canteen back and forth like it still held something stronger than water. The skyline flickered in every direction. Cairo never really slept, it just held its breath.
Sometimes it was the back alley near the post exchange. You’d sit on crates. Watch dogs fight in the dust. Say nothing for twenty minutes straight. Once, he dragged you out into the rain, lifted his face to the sky like the water was fine wine, and swore it was better than any meal. You said he wasn't right in the head, but you still laughed, even when you were both soaked through.
The rooftop of the abandoned Imperial Hotel became yours. You’d sit on the ledge, thighs nearly touching, passing a canteen that tasted of metal and memories. His pinky would brush yours when he handed it back. Neither of you acknowledged it but neither of you stopped.
He always showed up looking like he’d wrestled a truck on the way over. His shirt would be wrinkled, sleeves rolled, the top buttons undone just enough to be impolite. He didn’t speak gently. He never had. But his shoulders sat lower now. Less like he was bracing for a punch.
“I saw Cooper this morning,” he muttered one night, eyes fixed on the streetlights below. “He’s sunburnt to hell. Red as a lobster.”
You snorted. “Suits him.”
“Doesn’t suit anyone.”
“Neither do you,” you said, too quickly.
He glanced sideways. “You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“Wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
You went quiet again. Cairo shimmered in the distance, yellow and gold and half-suffocating.
Once, his knee rested against yours and didn’t move. Another time, you dropped your hand between the two of you and he didn’t flinch. He just kept talking, low and deliberate, about nothing in particular. Maybe about the heat, a newspaper headline, or even a fight he saw between a cat and a pigeon. His voice settled into your chest like an old injury. He never said the right thing. But sometimes he said something that almost was.
“I think the war’s starting to forget about us,” you said once.
“No,” he muttered. “It’s just waiting for us to sober up and ruin someone’s day."
“You sound sure.”
He shrugged. “I’m not. But if I were the sort who believed in certainty, that’s the lie I’d pick.”
That was the shape of you and him. Sentences that looped, meaning tucked beneath the obvious. You both never said what you meant, only wandered near it.
“Ever think about what you’ll do after?” You asked, watching smoke curl from a chimney that hadn’t worked in years.
“After what?”
“All this.”
He didn’t answer right away. Just took a canteen, sipped, and passed it to you. “Don’t think I’m built for after.”
“You’re not built for Cairo either,” you muttered. “But here you are.”
He smirked faintly, lazy and crooked. “Aye, well. Maybe I died in the desert and no one told me.”
“Ghosts don’t drink rainwater and call it a pint."
“They do if they’re Irish and bored.”
There were nights you wanted to say it. Not love. You wouldn’t go that far. But something near it. Something aching and warm and wrecked. Instead, you’d lean your head against your palm and watch him. Let the silence hold the things you were too much of a coward to name.
And Mayne? He’d sit beside you like he’d do it forever, as long as you never asked him why.
Later, it was quieter.
You ended up somewhere else. Not by plan, not really. It was him who led, without saying much, just a glance and a nod, like he already knew the route and didn’t care if you followed. You did.
It was an old theatre, or something that had once held velvet and sound. And now it was just dust and memory. The roof was half-caved, and the marble tiles were cracked down the centre like a bad omen. But in the middle of it all, absurdly, there stood a grand piano with yellowing keys, top warped with heat. Forgotten and ghostly. It hadn’t been played in years.
He stepped around it like it wasn’t strange, like it belonged there. Like you both did.
You sat near the front row — or what was left of it — on the broken lip of a seat with stuffing spilling out. Mayne dropped down beside you, back to a column, legs outstretched. One boot still caked in desert mud, the other tapping a slow, restless rhythm on the red carpet.
The air smelled like mildew and something older. Perfume trapped in plaster. Heat and brass. Something soft, too. A perfume you couldn’t place.
He struck a match with his thumb, lit a cigarette, then offered you one without looking. You didn’t smoke, and you know he didn't as well, but you took it anyway. Just to feel the heat when his fingers brushed yours.
No one else in Cairo knew you were there. No one would’ve cared. And that made it feel almost sacred. Like if anything mattered at all anymore, maybe it was this.
Just him and you and now.
“What are we doing?” You asked, quietly. You hadn’t meant to.
He exhaled, long and slow. “Now or in the grand, doomed sense?”
“Both.”
That got a faint chuckle out of him. “Right now I’m sitting in a haunted theatre with a person who thinks I don’t notice when she stares at me sideways.”
“Not what I was doing.”
“Oh no? You just burn holes in the wall behind me for sport, is it?”
You didn’t answer.
He leaned forward just a bit. Voice lower, rougher. “That’s what I thought.”
The lamp buzzed like it had a heartbeat. The shadows clung to the walls like they were listening. He didn’t look smug. He didn’t look cocky. He just looked tired, and something else. Like maybe he’d been waiting for this part — this moment — longer than you had.
He glanced over, deadpan. “Hell of a date spot, eh? Nothing says romance like crumbling plaster and the faint stench of piss.”
You raised an eyebrow. “You trying to impress me?”
He shrugged. “Could’ve taken you to a jazz club. But this place’s got ghosts, and I thought they’d appreciate the company.”
“Charming.”
He grinned, all teeth. “Stick with me. I’ll show you every cursed building from here to Benghazi.”
You sat. Legs sprawled. His thigh brushed yours, warm and solid. Neither of you shifted. The quiet settled again. But this time, it pulsed.
Then he looked at you. “I think about that night sometimes,”
“Which one?”
He snorted, but it was thin and hollow. “Don’t start that shite. You know.”
Your chest stilled. You kept your eyes on the dark space between. “You were bleeding out. High on morphine.”
“Still happened.”
You didn’t deny it. Just reached down, picked at a loose thread on your trouser cuff like it might unravel the whole moment. His hand found yours — calloused, warm, a little too firm for someone who’d come that close to vanishing. But it was the way his thumb moved, slow and unsure, that gave him away.
He wasn’t nervous. Not Mayne.
Except tonight, he was. The kind of nervous that looked like a shallow breath, a flick of the throat when he swallowed, a glance that didn’t quite meet yours.
“I was gonna say something,” he muttered, voice low and half-slurred. “That night.”
“Yeah?”
“Forgot the fucking words.”
“That's rare.”
He huffed a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Was gonna quote Yeats. Or some dead Irish bastard. Or maybe the back of a whiskey bottle, I don’t know.”
“Say it now,” you whispered.
He looked at you then. Not fully, just sideways. Like you’d blind him if he stared too long. “I can’t,” he said, almost too quietly. “Not when you’re looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you already know.”
You didn’t answer. Your hand was still in his. You could feel the shake in his fingers now, small and buried, like he was furious at himself for letting it slip. His thigh brushed yours again. You didn't move. The air in the room was wrong. Too thick and too loud, even the silence. Something waited between you with its teeth bared. Neither of you dared breathe too deep in case it shattered.
He leaned in, just slightly. Close enough for you to count his freckles. Close enough that you could smell the Cairo dust still clinging to his collar. “I can't make sense of it. Whatever this is,” he said, rough. “But I swear it's eating me alive.”
And then — nothing. You could feel him hesitate. You didn’t ask why.
Instead, he stood. Hands on his knees, slow like something ached in him. Maybe everything. He wandered just a few steps across the ruined floor, toward the front of the room.
The piano sat there like it had been waiting.
“Eoin was supposed to teach me,” he said, after a beat. Voice low again, flat. “Back in Palestine. Said he’d show me scales if I stopped flaying the lads in sparring.”
He set his hands on the keys like they might bite. Pressed one, and the note came out wrong. Dead and sour. He muttered a curse under his breath — thick and Irish — and kept playing. Something simple. Something sad. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t in tune. That his rhythm was off and his back was stiff and he played like a man trying not to break open.
You watched. His hands. His shoulders. The rise of his chest when he paused. You watched and the rest of the world blurred at the edges.
He didn’t look up when you crossed the room. Just kept playing.
You sat beside him, not speaking, not touching. Not until you did. First, you leaned in and let your lips rest against the slope of his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to be a kiss, just a breath or a pause, something quieter than either of you could name. Then you let your head follow, resting there like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like it had always known the way there. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t stiffen. Just kept playing, softer now. Like the noise between you needed someplace to go.
Your eyes slipped shut.
For a second, you thought: If someone bombed Cairo right now, you’d probably just stay sitting.
That was love, apparently. Real inconvenient.
You didn’t plan gifts.
That would’ve meant admitting something. And neither of you were very good at that.
You found the necklace at a stall on a street where the alley chokes with incense smoke and fake antiques. The vendor tried to convince you that it was sacred — thin knots, silver-dipped cross, “blessed by a desert monk.” Lies, obviously. But the cord was sturdy, black-woven and burnished at the edges, and you could thread a little metal into it.
So you did.
A sliver of Eoin’s tag, just the flat steel with his name on it, small enough to carry but heavy enough to remember. Woven in like a secret. One you didn’t even know if you had the right to give.
You didn’t wrap it. Just showed up late that afternoon, found him leaning against a column near your usual cafe, legs stretched.
“Here,” you said, and tossed it at his chest.
He caught it one-handed, rough fingers closing around it like he expected it to bite. Didn’t thank you. Didn’t ask why. Just looked at it.
You hadn’t meant for it to be about Eoin. Not really. But something about the way Mayne sat at that piano playing notes that didn’t quite fit had pulled the memory up. Eoin was the reason you even knew each other. The first fracture. The first loss. Maybe part of you wanted Mayne to remember that. Not the grief, but what came after. What you both made out of the wreckage. Or maybe it was just a thought that showed up and refused to leave. The kind you don’t look at too closely, in case it looks back.
“Did you rob a priest for this?” he muttered, brow twitching.
“Only a small one.”
He didn’t laugh. But he didn’t take it as a joke, either. Just tied the cord around his neck, right there in the street with no mirror and no fumbling apology. His fingers lingered longer than they needed to. The black cord looked too clean against his sunburned skin, too deliberate.
“Don’t wear it if you hate it.”
“Did I say I hated it?”
“You didn’t say you liked it.”
He met your eyes, flat and unreadable. “Then take it off me.”
You didn’t move. He didn’t either.
The next day, he handed you something. Supposedly a gift, but he didn’t announce it, didn’t make it a moment out of it. Just dropped it into your palm with all the grace of handing over a bullet.
It was leather, worn, and woven tight and thick, like something made for a soldier’s wrist. A single bead inlaid near the buckle: cobalt blue, almost black, with a faint white ring at the center.
“The eye,” you said softly. “Nazar.”
“For luck,” he muttered. “Or to keep you from setting everything on fire.”
You looked at him. “You believe in that?”
“I believe in giving you something to fiddle with so you don’t punch anyone.”
You wore it anyway. Tight. So tight it left a faint red line on your skin the first night. And later, you caught him glancing at it. At the way it sat on you.
Just like you caught him reaching up to touch the cord around his own neck when he thought you weren’t looking. Thumb pressing the knot. A ghost of a smile in the corner of his mouth. Never full, never certain, like it didn’t have permission to stay.
Some nights, you couldn’t sleep.
You’d lie on the narrow couch, the new one you hadn’t unwrapped until Cairo got too quiet. You'd look at the ceiling and think about him.
Think about Eoin.
You'd remember the way he used to look at Mayne, in that steady, admiring, and quiet way. He never said it out loud, not really, but you could see it in the way he watched him from across the tent. The way his voice changed when he spoke about him. It wasn’t love. Not the soft kind, anyway. But it was something.
And Mayne — he never looked back. Not openly. Not the same way.
You used to wonder if that meant he didn’t care. Now you know better. He just doesn’t give things away like that. You have to peel it out of him, with a crowbar and a lit match preferably.
Still, you were jealous. Not of Eoin. But of what they had. The unspoken thing. The closeness forged in the fire before you even got there. A head start you could never catch up to.
And then you were jealous of Mayne. Of his place. His body. His rage. Of the way he just exists without asking permission. The way the world bends around him, even when it wants to break him.
Some days, you wanted to be him. Other days, you wanted to scream at him.
You were angry. At yourself. For how easy it was to give him everything. For how badly you wanted to, without him even asking. For how he could look at you like you were nothing, and everything, in the same breath, and never say a word about it.
You hated how you understood him. And you hated how you still wanted more.
You hated the war most of all.
You kept thinking about that moment in the theatre, at the piano. His hands too clumsy for it. The awkwardness. The quiet. The way he looked when he mentioned Eoin. How the grief hadn’t softened, just receded like an old bruise. How it still lived in his fingers, even now.
And then everything hit at once.
The stillness. The silence. The fact that you weren’t moving — not toward a mission, not toward purpose, not toward anything that felt like yours. His words echoed in your skull: You’re not half of anything. You never were. That’s what. But your limbs wouldn’t listen. Your chest felt too tight, your head too loud. You curled up on the couch. The one you hadn’t meant to keep, hadn’t meant to sleep on, hadn’t meant to feel this alone on. And just folded in. Knees drawn, breath held.
Because how do you fight to belong in a war that never asked for you? How do you stand your ground when even your shadow keeps disappearing? You wanted to move. To try. To earn the stripes he thought you already wore. But you couldn’t. Not tonight.
The bracelet dug against your skin. Woven leather, warm from your body heat. Too heavy for something so small.
It wasn’t cursed. It wasn’t even particularly magical.
But God, it knew how to press.