Euphonia Hotel Sutra

November 2 N.I.C., Heinessen

The last day before a deployment, especially a large campaign, always felt to Bergengrun like it took place in an altered place outside of the normal flow of time, like a holiday from reality. All the tension of long preparation cut off abruptly as the deadline drew near: there was no longer anything left to do except leave at the appointed hour— everything that could be settled, was. There were, of course, still people hard at work hauling supplies onto ships, corralling enlisted men back from their leave and into their duty stations, and checking weapons systems over. But Bergengrun’s duties were finished on Heinessen, aside from those he would be performing as Fleet Admiral Reuenthal’s chief of staff, and those would resume properly once they were in space. 

It was a testament to Reuenthal’s fleet, from the top down, that there was no fevered rush of of last minute decisions, the kind of haste that characterized evacuations rather than departures, during the lead up to their sortie. One might have accused Reuenthal of having kept his fleet in a state of readiness for this opportunity to rise against his master, but if Reuenthal had been ready to put down republican rebellions, the preparations would have been essentially the same. Every soldier needed to eat; every ship needed to be kept in good working order. It was only the plans drawn up for battle locations and deployment routes that differed from one enemy to the other.

As he always did before departure, Bergengrun spent forty-five minutes over his lunch updating his will, and filing it with the nearest branch of the Phezzani bank he used. There was a long line of other soldiers stretching out the door there, officers and enlisted men alike, doing the same. Some tried to shuffle out of Bergengrun’s way as he stood in line, but he waved them away and just waited his turn. He was in no rush, and the line moved quickly. The bank had a very efficient system for everyone who had already typed up and printed out the appropriate documents— at the counter there were six tellers ready to witness the final signature, stamp, and take the form away for filing. He wondered if this efficiency was a familiar and well-practiced one, having been used for Alliance soldiers waiting to depart during the long course of the war. It probably was, and only the uniforms of those signing their names at the tellers’ station had changed. 

Bergengrun’s will was short, as he had neither many possessions nor much family to speak of. Being a professional soldier, one without a wife, he had never collected much more than could be hauled around in an officer’s trunk, and in his younger years, much of even that space had been dedicated to bottles rather than sentiment. 

The motorcycle he had purchased on Heinessen should be sold, and the money given to an educational charity for Neue Land’s war orphans. It wasn’t a choice made from guilt or sentimentality; he selected it at random from a list of charities provided by the Neue Reich’s Veterans Affairs office. He had four cousins on his mother’s side— they could split his liquid assets and death benefit payouts The executor would be someone from the fleet law office, saving everyone some trouble. Cremate his body, if he left a corpse. A whole life amounted to less than a page. He signed his name at the counter, thanked the woman who stamped the envelope, tried to think very little about it, and that was all.

He returned to the headquarters in the Euphonia Hotel, did what little work remained to be done, and watched the sun slowly sink down behind the shimmering glass-fronted buildings of Heinessenpolis. After he ate his dinner, he found he had nothing left to do. He thought about returning to his quarters in the upper floors of the building, where both he and Reuenthal kept rooms, but when he got up there, he couldn’t bring himself to enter his empty hotel room. Instead, in the small gathering area at the end of the hallway, one that would only ever be used for people waiting for a busy elevator, he sat and looked out the window at the darkness. 

How long he sat there, he didn’t know, but the elevator chimed, and a single person stepped out. Bergengrun didn’t turn towards him, until the person spoke. 

“Were you waiting for me, Bergengrun?” Reuenthal asked, appearing behind his chair in the reflection in the window.

“Sir!” Bergengrun said, standing hastily to address Reuenthal properly. “No— I lost track of time.”

“It’s hard to tell how late it is after the sun’s gone down.”

Bergengrun glanced back out the window. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good sense of time on this planet. The days are the wrong length.”

Reuenthal made a noise that could have been agreement as he, too, stared out the dark window. The only thing it revealed was their reflections.

“I thought you might be waiting to make one last plea for me to change my mind,” Reuenthal said after a moment.

“No, sir. You’ve made up your mind.”

“But you want me to change it.”

He wondered if Reuenthal had written a will and filed it with a Phezzani bank. “I don’t want to lose another superior.”

Reuenthal’s eyes were fixed over Bergengrun’s shoulders, looking into the glass. “Siegfried Kircheis was a better man than I am,” he said. “If I had died first, you wouldn’t need to be here.”

“I don’t believe that’s true.”

Reuenthal’s lips twitched, almost amused. “Which part?”

“Sir—”

“Forget it,” he said. He turned away from Bergengrun, towards his own suite down the hallway. Bergengrun initially did nothing but watch him go, but there was something in Reuenthal’s posture, or something he imagined in Reuenthal’s posture, or at least he had not been dismissed, that indicated that Bergengrun should follow him. 

The hallway was long, and the walls were decorated with wallpaper with a pattern of birds on it: the euphonia finch, common in the tropics of Heinessen, for which the hotel was named. Walking at a certain speed and blinking, the still yellow birds seemed to fly, like a zoetrope. When he fell into step behind Reuenthal’s shoulder, Reuenthal’s reflection in one of the hallway mirrors smirked. It made an odd feeling rise in Bergengrun’s chest and throat, a tightness and misery that he couldn’t explain away in its entirety.

Reuenthal let them both into his suite, which was as impersonal as any hotel room in the building. After the door shut behind them both, Reuenthal stood in the entryway and took off his cape, hanging it on the hook near the door, then paused. He touched the throat of his uniform jacket, the hidden clasps there that would open it, and looked at Bergengrun for a long second. Bergengrun didn’t notice this— he was fastidiously not watching Reuenthal and the strange smirk on his face, and instead was looking at the modern furniture. It was identical to that in his own suite.

Reuenthal took off his jacket, hung it, and then Bergengrun finally looked back towards him when he heard the clunk of Reuenthal putting his sidearm down on the hall table. The look he gave Reuenthal must have been surprised or questioning enough for Reuenthal to hold his hands up, as if in surrender, and explain as he walked further into the coldly lit hotel suite.

“You have another chance to kill me,” he said, facing away from Bergengrun as he walked towards the couch. “You should take it. Siegfried Kircheis died unarmed.”

“Sir—”

Reuenthal waved his hand, and Bergengrun was grateful that he wasn’t expected to say anything else. “It’s a pity that your loyalty is wasted a traitor. I feel like I only deserve people like—” He cut himself off with a harsh little laugh.

“It doesn’t have to be wasted.”

“So, you are here to ask me to change my mind.” He was at the bar cabinet in the far corner of the room, and he took out two glasses and filled them up. “Care for a drink?”

“I don’t drink,” Bergengrun said.

This gave Reuenthal pause. “You don’t?”

“Call it loyalty— I haven’t since I was under Fleet Admiral Kircheis.”

“He would drink,” Reuenthal said. He turned around and held out the glass he had prepared for Bergengrun. Bergengrun’s eyes fixed on his fingers on the cut crystal of the glass.

“I know,” Bergengrun said. “But he convinced me not to.”

“I didn’t think he cared about things like that.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t ever say a word to me about it.”

“Then?”

“He was a good man,” Bergengrun said. “He made me want to be a better one.”

Reuenthal was still holding out the glass, but he put it down on the bar cabinet after studying Bergengrun for a few seconds. He stood straight under that scrutiny. “He had that effect on people, or so I’m told.”

“He didn’t on you? You knew him for longer than I did.”

“He recognized the futility of it, in my case,” Reuenthal said. “I, on the other hand, do the opposite.”

“Sir,” Bergengrun said again.

“I’m making you traitor.”

Reuenthal delivered this statement without rancor in his voice, and without humor, either. It was simply a measured tone, and with a gaze that measured Bergengrun in turn. It made Bergengrun take a few steps forward towards Reuenthal, who watched him, and then turned back away towards the window. 

“I make my own choices,” Bergengrun said. “And I choose what I value. The closer my loyalty lies, the more important it is to me.”

“The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away,” Reuenthal intoned. He drank, and Bergengrun watched him do it. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it: the motion of Reuenthal’s hand, the twitch of his throat as he swallowed, the wetness of his lips when he withdrew the glass.

“Yes,” he agreed, though he had taken so long to say anything that it felt like a disjointed affirmation of nothing.

Reuenthal was silent. 

“May I say something, sir?”

“Please.”

“Why are you trying to convince me to betray you?”

That funny smile on Reuenthal’s face again, the one that twisted something in Bergengrun’s gut. “If I was a liar, I’d say it’s to save your life.”

“You’re not a liar, sir.”

“Then the truth is, it’s the same reason I’m going to offer you a drink again,” Reuenthal said. He finished his own glass, and refilled it. “Do you want some?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

“If I had said yes?”

His teeth showed through his lips. He drank. “You can only want things that you don’t have.”

“And what do you want from me, sir?”

Reuenthal came towards him, his half empty glass in his hand. They were a meter apart, then a foot apart, then inches apart. Reuenthal stopped, before Bergengrun could decide if he wanted to step backwards or not. He had, of course, been this close to Reuenthal before— incidentally crammed into a car next to each other, or in an elevator, or walking shoulder to shoulder down the hallway, or even leaning close to his ear to give a word of advice or take an order. But this was very different. Reuenthal raised his glass, and drank, leaving just a quarter of the whiskey, closing his eyes as he did. Bergengrun could smell it.

“Nothing you’d be willing to give me,” Reuenthal said.

The closeness was an invitation. It had taken him too long to understand what he had fallen into, and what he wanted, and what Reuenthal was asking for. He thought for a moment about kneeling, but instead closed the distance between them— so little distance that it wasn’t much to cross— and Reuenthal lowered his glass away from his mouth.

Bergengrun kissed him. The tight, strange smile stayed on Reuenthal’s face, until he opened his mouth to let Bergengrun kiss him more fully. Reuenthal nipped at his lips, and Bergengrun’s tongue when it moved. He could taste the whiskey in his mouth, so present it shocked him, made his stomach turn and the old want rise up inside himself. 

Reuenthal pushed him away after only a moment more, leaving Bergengrun disoriented. He stepped back to the cabinet where he had left the glass he had poured for Bergengrun, and he held it up.

“Drink with me,” Reuenthal said.

Bergengrun wanted it, and wanted more than that, and he looked at Reuenthal and was sick with how much he wanted it. “No, sir.”

Reuenthal smiled, that same strange, unhappy smile, raised the glass in a silent toast, and drank it all at once, tilting his head back. Bergengrun watched the ecstasy of his closed eyes, but slipped out the door of Reuenthal’s suite before the glass was empty.