Read part One // Master-post // Continued from here
Would you look at that? It's Friday guys... mmhm, friday, I am not late... ahem, Lee... why do you have a baseball bat? LEE?! WAI-WAIT-WAIT!- *posts chapter*
*****
Luca swallows uneasily as he continues to follow Flint into the denser part of the forest. There’s no trail here or beaten path and Luca’s legs burn as he trudges behind Flint up the steep incline. Cold air stings his throat and lungs with every breath, as the rain pelts him from above. The pack on his back, with all of his belongings in this world, is heavy on his shoulders as they climb. The rain added an extra fun element of terror as slick leaves carpet the forest floor and the mud under becomes slippery. Luca’s legs and arms were already covered in dirt from falling a couple times. Flint doesn’t slow his pace or even look back at Luca, he merely said: “on your feet, cadet,” and continued on.
Flint walks with the same purposeful strides that he did on flat ground, like he’s walking along the pavilion in the capital. Luca wanted to kill him. Is he even breathing heavy? Luca doesn’t know. He could barely hear the sounds of animals or the twigs crunching underfoot because of the heaviness of his own breath reflecting on the air like shards of frosted glass.
“Keep up, Cadet,” Flint calls, his voice carrying smoothly over the expanse of thin air.
“You try and carry all your things and tell me to keep up,” Luca grumbles under his breath.
“Soldiers don’t mumble, Fletcher.” Flint says.
But more important than a retort was the flat that Luca came upon and his knees almost buckled in relief at seeing a log cabin in the distance. It would still be a few minutes of a walk, but Luca doesn’t care now that the end was in sight. And at the fact that Flint was not taking him deep into the woods to murder him without witnesses.
Luca blew his breath up to lift any hair, that wasn’t cemented against his forehead with sweat and rain, out of his eyes. Beads of liquid flick away from his face and join the rain as it falls, doing nothing to dry his face. At least the rain was cold, which was nice on his skin and neck, but his clothes soaked him to the bone. He wants nothing more than to just lie down and sleep. His pace quickens as the shelter grows closer and closer. This training t-shirt did nothing to keep him warm, instead, the fabric clung to his skin as he walked, boots occasionally slipping as they travelled.
“Gods, they hate you that much that they keep you this far out?” Luca asks with a scoff. Flint doesn’t reply as he walks to the door and unlocks it, holding it open for Luca to follow through.
“Me?” Flint asks, raising a brow as he looks around the cabin. “This is the safest distance we thought that would keep you out of trouble. Far away from civilisation.”
Flint’s voice has a lilt to it. The longer he speaks, the more it comes through. Though his words are clear and his voice smooth, there’s something that softens his bluntness.
Luca just grunts in response, eyes roaming around the inside of the cabin. From the door where he stands, there’s a large living space, with an old, green clothed couch and two armchairs positioned around an open fire that matches the colour of moss desperately clinging to trees. Straight ahead he can see through to the kitchen, and there’s three more doors leading off from the living room. Two on the left, and one on the right. He dumps his bag hard on the ground, rolling his shoulders as he winces, his back aching as he stretches. “Right so how’s this gonna work, this some sort of romcom book where there’s only one bed and we have to share it?”
“There are adequate bedding arrangements,” Flint says slowly, brows pinching in confusion. He blinks at Luca a few times before he disappears from the main room of the cabin, down towards the kitchen, and rustles around inside it, cabinet doors opening and closing. “Are you thirsty, cadet?”
Luca slumps down in one of the armchairs with a groan. “Yeah, fuckin parched.” He ruffles his hand through his hair, hoping to get as much rain out of his hair as he could, feeling like a bloody wet dog.
“Excellent,” Flint says as he returns from kitchen with a large bucket. “The well is just three kilometres west of the cabin. It’s a straight shot. You shouldn’t miss it.”
Flint walks over to Luca and drops the bucket in his lap.
Luca grunts from the weight of the bucket hitting against him. He pauses looking between the bucket and the general. “You’re not serious. You drag me all this way, out to the middle of bloody nowhere and then get me to go to the well like I’m some olden days maiden? Put the bucket outside for two minutes and it will be full of bloody rain.” He throws the bucket across the room. The bucket clatters to the ground before rolling to a stop against the wood of the walls, and a thick silence follows.
Flint stares at Luca for a solid minute in silence. For the first couple of seconds Luca stares up in defiance. But the stare continues and it seems to puncture his skin and root around his veins, searching for any weaknesses, climbing into his skull as if he could read his thoughts and find every rotten thing about him. It makes him squirm internally, and Luca wants to look away but refuses. He sets his eyes into a narrow stare of his own and matches Flint’s.
After what felt like years of deathly silence, Flint says, “there was one more form I was meant to show you.” He walks to the small coffee table between the couches and the fireplace and retrieves the manila folder with Luca’s transfer forms.
“I didn’t think it would be necessary so early on, but…” he continues as he returns to Luca and hands him the form.
The words Discharge Papers in bold, black lettering on the top of the page catches Luca’s eyes and his mouth goes dry.
“Should you refuse to participate in any of the tasks I set you, I will write this up and you will be discharged from the army without honours. Effective immediately.”
It takes everything in the cadet to keep his hand still, not to shake. He shoves the papers back against the general’s chest before standing up, snatching the bucket and storming outside, slamming the door shut behind him, anger plummeting through his veins as he storms off to the direction the well.
Discharge papers. Discharge papers… he- he wouldn’t. Flint couldn’t! The army was all – Luca’s hands shake – from anger or fear or shock, he doesn’t know – so he tightens his grip until his knuckles burn white around the handle. When he’s far enough away from the cabin he puts his forearm against a tree and lets out a bellowing, from the chest: “FUCK!”
Why him? Why is only he getting punished? What about Lance? And his pack of dickheads, what about the fucking lieutenants who made his life hell as a cadet? They probably didn’t even report his scores properly because– FUCK! This isn’t fair. Why him? Why did he always have to be the unlucky one?
Hot water trickles down his cheeks mixing with the icy drops of rain that patter down relentlessly on his head. His bottom lip wobbles as he tries to get himself together, to- to hold himself together but seeing those papers… how serious Flint was about giving them to him. Somehow Luca knew that the General would make good on his threat if Luca disobeyed or didn’t behave and he wanted to be sick.
Nausea climbs thick up his throat. Luca drops the bucket; hands braced on his knees and doubles over retching out the contents of his stomach. Nothing but bile and acid come out, stinging and tearing at his throat. He gags a little as he straightens up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and spitting on the forest floor. He swallows, trying to rid himself of the acidic burn in his mouth as he grabs the bucket. Water. He needed water.
Halfway to the well he realises he didn’t even get dinner today and realises he’s starving. That swim was a stupid idea… and training hard all morning with Jet. This day just couldn’t get any fucking worse, could it?
Luca pours the first bucket of water from the well straight into his mouth, before lowering the rope and pulling up more to fill the bucket to bring back to the house. The bastard could wait for a drink, Luca thought mutinously, let him suffer for a change.
When Luca returns with a bucket full of water, covered in new patches of dirt on his arms, knees and boots, Flint is sitting in front of the roaring fire. He removed his coat, left it hanging up neatly, dressed in just a long sleeve shirt now. His hair was freshly washed and his reading glasses on while he overlooks some files.
“Ah, you found it then,” he comments as Luca comes in. “Excellent. Your orientation scores weren’t listed on your records, so I had to check. You can set it down in the kitchen and then have a shower.”
Luca practically thumps the bucket on the ground, resisting the urge to throw it down. He grumbles, eyes set to a glare as he takes in how well-groomed the man in front of him was – no doubt warm from the fire as Luca stood there, mud, rain, and water from the well dripping from him as he shakes from the cold. “What, do I have to get water for the fucking shower too?” He snaps.
“No,” Flint says without looking up from his documents. “We have running water here, it’s just not clean enough to drink. The water’s warm too. So, I advise you do that before you get hypothermic.”
Luca goes to move but then pauses. He hates the idea of Flint reading every detail about him, thinking he can know Luca from what he read from a file. A file that was filled out by people who hated him, who wanted to see him fail. How is that fair? And what sort of things were in it? What had they noted down about him? There were definitely things that Luca forgot about himself, that Flint was just leisurely reading through, as if he was a character in a fucking novel.
“Your room is the door to your right, cadet.” Luca just nods and goes into the room, shutting the door behind him. On the bed are new tracksuit bottoms and a training shirt, new jocks and socks neatly laid out along with a towel. Luca grabs them and walks out, crossing the cabin to – what he hoped was – the bathroom. Luckily, he guessed right.
After figuring out how to work the shower, he strips his soaking clothes and dumps them into a basket in the corner of the bathroom. As he steps in, he sighs as the hot water pellets against his skin, harder than the rain, as if it was trying to undo all the shit he went through today, easing the tension slowly from his body. He practically melts into the heat, closing his eyes. He hasn’t taken a hot shower like this… ever really… and it’s so nice, soothing, not at all like the cold showers in the cadets’ quarters and the pressure was a welcomed weight, not too hard or soft.
Fuck this day. Fuck Flint and Captain Daniels and the fucking lieutenants, but for the shower, this beautiful, magnificent shower, he would go through today again. And Luca was going to stay under the spray of water until he felt the stress wash off him and trickle down the drain.
*****
ROLL CALL MAGGOTS! (aka, the tag-list): @imgoingtobiteyounow @whumplicity @creatureofstories @afternoonfairy @castell-da-near (lmk if you wanna be added/removed)
ALSO IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, LOOK AT THE FRICKEN MASTER-POST, @whumpasaurus101 MADE A BRILLIANT COLLAGE OF THE VIBES OF THE STORY AND RAGGHHH I LOVE IT SM!!!!
