Notes: All of my love goes out to my beta, marilla82, who fearlessly took this on, even if the idea of only one sentence a piece made her twitch. I would never get anything written if not for her and her badger poking spoon. I need to get in the kitchen and bake her a pie, seriously. Written for 1sentence at LJ.
#16 – Breaking - Vicious had been cracked before the war; so when the new comrades arrived at his regiment with their eagerness and trust, it was all he could do to bide his time and wait in the shadows until one of them slipped more clearly into his sights and could be broken by his own hands.
#44 – Near - Vicious' first impression of Gren was that he talked too loudly, smiled too passionately and burned too brightly; he was a sun that would never set.
#21 – Quiet - The constant hyper drone of weapons and people and animals and wind hadn't been hard for Gren to get used to; it was the calm, dead silence that strung between him and his tent mate each night that really unnerved him.
#17 – Belief - Gren believed in music and loyalty and hope; Vicious didn't believe in anything but himself, and would scold Gren if he prattled on too long and tried to fill the silence with his nonsense.
#14 – Burning - Gren knew who he was and had a boy back home, but that didn't stop his skin from being burned by every accidental brush it made against comrade's; it burned like cheap liquor in his throat, like white hair that reflected the sun into his eyes.
#47 – Valiant - Gren didn't know where Vicious had found the long, slender piece of bone, or what poor animal it had come from, but as he watched him practice his sword play alone -- couldn't afford to get rusty, he'd said -- he knew that he was watching a man who played for keeps, and that if he got started, he wouldn't be allowed to back down.
#03 – Wishes - "Make a wish," Gren joked, as the meteorites burned up in Titan's atmosphere; and even though he didn't expect a response from his taciturn comrade, he couldn't help but be a little hurt by the way Vicious rolled his eyes and looked the other way, muttering something about wasted time and delusional grandeur under his breath.
#09 – War - "Stop simpering," Vicious said as he pulled the bullet from Gren's leg, each syllable of his monotone hitting like ammunition and causing Gren's frown to deepen and the light in his eyes to die, "you're not the only one dying here."
#35 – Sarcasm - "You know, you sure do have a winning smile," Gren said under his breath, and Vicious pretended he hadn't heard him; he'd heard that before from more genuine lips, and he couldn't help but feel a little warmer.
#11 – Birthday - "Today you are reborn as mine," Vicious growled into his ear from behind and Gren wondered at the man's arrogance, and how it could feel so disturbingly right under the circumstances.
#48 – Virtuous - "You think you're better than me," Vicious asked, stretched out naked on his mat and watching Gren move about and clean off; Gren couldn't find the words to answer.
#18 – Balloon - On the rare occasion that Gren could get Vicious to talk about his life on Mars, Vicious would swell with pride and explain in great detail about Mao and the Red Dragon and what loyalty was supposed to be; but then he would falter and utter half of a name, sometimes Spi-, sometimes Ju-, and deflate again into silence.
#04 – Wonder - The first time Vicious kissed Gren (roughly against the side of the trench, to prove that he was the one in control), the look of wonder in the other man's eyes had been so tangible that he could have drank it in and been sustained by it, and he knew that it was just one more addiction that would slowly kill him.
#31 – Smirk - Gren tried to remind himself that it wasn't a real smile, not one of happiness; but that look on Vicious' face was happening because of the things that Gren himself was doing, and for now that would be enough.
#36 – Sordid - Gren had always been somewhat narcissistically attracted to the sound of his name on other people's lips; but when Vicious said it, it sounded like the basest, most torn down thing on that godforsaken moon, and it made him shiver.
#27 – Jester - Gren never heard Vicious laugh, not even the high, manic laugh of the soldiers who lost their minds; but there were times where, if he could play it just right, he might be rewarded with an unguarded smile and that was more than enough.
#02 – Waltz - They often found themselves in this closed position; hands on arms and hips and thighs, facing each other with stoic visages, never giving too much away, like dancers who knew the importance of keeping an eye on the competition.
#06 – Whimsy - Vicious only held on to emotions that gave him weight and purpose, so he was surprised to find that the sight of Gren, naked and sweaty with a trickle of blood left from where his teeth had broken skin, made him feel oddly light, like heat rising to the highest part of the atmosphere; he quickly killed the feeling.
#32 – Sorrow - Gren didn't believe in cheating, so he broke things off with the boy at home as soon as he could; he had expected it to hurt a little, as attached as he had been to him, but nothing prepared him for the pain of Vicious' reception of the news and the cruel things that he said.
#33 – Stupidity - "Idiot fag," Vicious snorted, lighting another cigarette and blowing the smoke into Gren's face, "I'm not your goddamned boyfriend and I'm not going to love you, so just go back to the people who pretend that they do."
#39 – Share - They had two blankets, but one blanket per person wasn't enough for the frigid desert night; Gren offered to share his, and his fear was almost endearing as Vicious licked the inside of his thigh and felt him shiver for reasons that had nothing to do with the cold.
#41 – Nowhere - Vicious liked to live up to his name and would leave teeth marks across Gren's neck and shoulders and scratch marks along his back and buttocks to create perverse art the way Gren composed music, wholly from emotion, and with no empty space left behind.
#34 – Serenade - "What kind of song would you write for me," Vicious asked, and Gren looked up from his gun, startled.
#24 – Quarrel - They didn't fight, so much as Gren would sulk and make snide comments and Vicious would ignore him or just grimace in his direction and tell him to stop being stupid; if anyone else in the regiment thought that it was amusing he kept it to himself for fear of having Vicious' grimace turned on him.
#01 – Walking - In the sands and the sudden storms of Titan they would stumble and crawl, but Gren couldn't help it that he closed his eyes when his hands and knees were buried in the sand and prayed for a day when the two of them would be able to walk upright together, regardless of motive.
#29 – Jewel - Gren's eyes were blue and probing and hopelessly open to everything, and there were days when all Vicious wanted was to see how they would sparkle if he ripped them out and threw them into the sand.
#45 – Natural - Vicious didn't like guns, despite his previous life, and never felt comfortable shooting them as he much preferred his sword; but Gren would smile when he saw the tremor in Vicious' hand as it held the heavy weapon and tell him that he looked like he had been made to shoot that gun.
#05 – Worry - The fact that Gren himself might die didn't bother him as much as the fact that fact that he worried over whether or not Vicious might die, and how sometimes when he couldn't sleep at night he would have wild visions of his comrade covered in blood with limbs bent at awkward angles, and the sickness he felt at the odd calming effect those visions had on him.
#15 – Breathing - "Swallow it," Vicious said as he pressed the gun to Gren's lips, and Gren tried not to smile as Vicious' breath hitched; because he knew that no matter how much Vicious like to appear in control, he was always more calm when the gun was pointed at him.
#22 – Quirks - Vicious often walked with his hand just at waist height, or clutched at his hip when startled; and when Gren asked him about it he answered that it was because he wasn't allowed to carry his sword, and Gren smiled at the thought of there being something that Vicious loved after all.
#37 – Soliloquy - "You talk too goddamn much," Vicious snarled, and nipped at Gren's neck, but secretly he was thankful, because Julia had never talked during sex, and it felt so good to have something different.
#19 – Balcony - Gren wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to remember what he had actually come into the building for, before Vicious had dragged him bodily up to the darkened balcony overlooking the storehouse floor and pushed him to his knees.
#28 – Jousting - For fun the men would unload their rifles and then run at one another with them and try to knock each other over with brute force and the butts of their weapons; Vicious never participated, but face couldn't be lost for finding something to do nearby whenever Gren was involved in a game.
#26 – Jump - Vicious heaved the knife and Gren felt himself jump out of his skin before he realized that it hadn't been him Vicious was aiming for; "you make a habit out of saving worthless people, don't you," he asked Vicious' retreating back.
#10 – Weddings - Brutal need and desperate sex in the midst of war was a marriage of convenience at best, and Gren knew that it would do for him to remember that their actions did not necessarily preclude a more permanent union.
#43 – Nuance - Sometimes Vicious talked in his sleep, and it was only because Gren spent so much time awake and listening to it that he could tell the difference in nuance between a softly whimpered Julia and a roughly growled Spike that he knew which one Vicious had forgiven even though he claimed not to believe in forgiveness.
#07 - Waste/Wasteland - Titan was barren and incalculably fickle in atmosphere and landscape, but then so were Vicious' eyes, with their changing color and heavy lids, and sometimes Gren went and slept outside in the dark nothingness just to remember what warmth felt like.
#38 – Sojourn - He had been home for three days before they came to take him into custody, upsetting his sheet music --the kind of song he'd write for Vicious -- in the process; and now that he had been in the dark sterility of the prison for more days than he could remember, he was beginning to think of what used to be his real life as only a vacation from a nightmare.
#20 – Bane - During the war, Vicious had never quite been able to convince Gren that his faith in others was often misplaced; but as he lay in the prison bed hooked to an IV that slowly dripped the day's third test drug into his veins, he started to see where Vicious might have had a point about faith working against him.
#42 – Neutral - Even though he told himself that he had always been alone, and that it shouldn't bother him to be that way now that he'd returned from the war, Vicious spent every sleepless night of that first week home in the exact middle of his bed, trying to be the zero point for the ghost of Julia to his left and the ghost of Gren to his right.
#30 – Just - He supposed that Vicious had ruined him for others in more ways than one, now that he had escaped with most of his mind, but with a body that was no longer a man's or a woman's; he couldn't be anything for anyone anymore, he was just an unplayed instrument.
#25 – Quitting - On Callisto things were going to be different; Gren was going to make a fresh start, albeit not like the one he had planned before the war, and he was going to stop being torn up about Vicious too, he really was, right after he wrote that one last song.
#08 - Whiskey and rum - The soldiers on Titan had been kept rather generously in alcohol; whiskey and rum and gin, because someone somewhere knew the importance of forgetting how to remember – and now Gren drinks only vodka and water because that's a lesson he had taken to heart.
#12 – Blessing - Julia sat on the corner stool and asked him to play slow, haunting songs in memory of a man she had left behind, told stories of her love for him and how she only wanted to save him; and Gren truly cherished her memories and her time, because it made him forget another man with other unsettling eyes.
#23 – Question - Gren let Julia talk about Vicious for hours, certain that he was the first person she had ever been able to talk about any of it with; and when he looked her in the eye and asked her if Vicious had ever known love she had smiled sadly and said "perhaps, at one time," and then, "I'm sorry."
#40 – Solitary - On Callisto he was lonely, but he had his saxophone, which only made him think of all those nights on Titan when he had thought that he wasn't alone, and realize that just because there was someone on the other side of the tent it didn't mean that they were ever with you.
#13 – Bias - Faye hadn't been fooled by his bias when it came to speaking about Vicious, or his slow, understanding words, but he knew that she was working with her own preconceptions of the man, and it really wouldn't be fair to ask her to throw them out for his, no matter how much time he had spent rationalizing them.
#49 – Victory - "Although, I was looking forward to seeing you, personally," Vicious said, and Gren felt his stomach rise and chided himself to stick to the plan; because when he saw the realization on Vicious' face of what he had been made into, then the real game would be won.
#50 – Defeat - In the end Julia had been right, about Vicious and about the eyes of the man who had carried him to his ship and about a million other little things that Gren had never wanted to admit or deign to think about; but it was that she had been right about promises that hurt him most of all as he headed back to Titan alone, breaking the final promise to himself.
#46 – Horizon - On his way back to Mars, Vicious saw the smaller ship in the distance, but didn't acknowledge it any more than he acknowledged Lin's body laid out on the deck; because sometimes suns have to set, and it's not as if he was ever accustomed to the light anyway.