Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 16

Cleaning up was grim work. Raven had started with Freud, he was the worst after all, most of his body had been blended into shards, but the pieces that remained whole had fused to the melted pleather of his pilot’s seat. Miraculously his head was still intact, a look of rapturous joy frozen on his dead face. Raven tried not to look at it as he scraped the rest of him from LOCKSMITH’s shrapnel.

Snail wasn’t pretty either, though that was more because he’d had to go under the skin, removing all of his electronic components to be disposed of properly before putting the rest of him in a body bag. By the time he was done with Snail, he looked almost like Raven used to.

Michigan was the easiest, Raven had just needed to pick him up carefully. Before Iguazu recovered from the bandaid he’d slapped on top of his faulty implants, Raven took him and LIGER TAIL back home so that his people could decide what they wanted to do with him. He hadn’t stayed long, Red was mad with grief and ready to do something stupid, but Nile had convinced him to hold off on launching at least long enough to get Michigan’s body. With hatred and exhaustion in his eyes, Nike had thanked him, because what else could he do?

Raven told Nile it might be better if he didn’t look at the body.

Nile told Raven to go fuck himself.

Freud and Snail didn’t get the same level of consideration. Raven didn’t want to afford them the respect of being returned home for burial. He only did the bare minimum in terms of respect and checked ALL MIND’s records to see if either of them practiced a religion that forbade cremation. Neither did.

He spent about an hour crushing the snow flat in an area large enough to build two pyres. Then he tore a bunch of plates from LOCKSMITH and OPEN FAITH to create a barrier between the snow and the flames. Once that was finished, he moved some of the dry wood he kept just in case the power went out again to the platforms he’d built and began to build two pyres. He paused in the middle of his work, sweat dripping from his forehead despite the cold. Then, he began to build a third.

Iguazu’s head was pounding when he woke up. Everything had taken on a familiar flatness. He brought his hand up to his left camera and felt his finger catch on the cracked lense.

“You took a lot of damage. How’re you feeling?” Raven sat on the end of the bed, his hands folded in his lap. His jumpsuit was stained with blood and Iguazu could see red beneath his metal shrouded fingernails.

“What happened?”

“Your mood regulator failed again. Do you remember what you did?”

Iguazu still felt the crush of bone beneath his fists.

“Yeah I remember.”

Raven looked down at his own hands. He’d clearly tried to clean the blood off of them, but it still clung to him under his nails.

“Michigan left a message for you, if you want to watch it.”

Iguazu just sat there for a moment.

“He left me a message?”

“Yeah, he did.”

He was sort of curious now. Michigan must’ve come up with a damn good insult if he’d bothered to send it to him before he ejected.

“Alright.”

Raven handed him a comms pad and stood up.

“You have somewhere to be?” Iguazu asked.

“No, I just don’t think you want me to be in here when you watch it.” Raven shut the door as he left.

Iguazu pressed play.

Michigan struggled to keep LIGER TAIL under control and its alarms blared, desperately trying to get him to realize how serious the situation was.

“I want you to know, I don’t blame you, Iguazu. Looking back on it things weren’t really going to end any other way, were they. I wasn’t lying, I always did think you had potential.” He let out a heavy sigh. “The only thing any good father wants for his sons is for them to surpass him one day. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you get there, Iguazu, but I’m glad you made it there without me.” His cockpit rattled as another laser blast struck LIGER TAIL’s hull. “I’m proud of you, son, I hope you know that.” Michigan switched his camera off.

Iguazu watched it a second time to make sure he wasn’t seeing things. By the third time his hands were gripping the sides of the pad so hard the glass shattered beneath his fingers.

Raven opened the door again at the sound of breaking glass.

“Are you alright?!”

“I’m fine,” Iguazu’s voice buzzed with static.

“Do you want me to fix your eye?” Raven asked. He’d fixed the dents in his plating and the giant hole in his chest, but for the eye he’d waited for Iguazu to be awake. It was the same eye that Michigan had blinded the last time they fought.

“No.” Iguazu crackled. “Just leave it. I’m used to it already.”

“I’m having a funeral.”

“For Michigan?”

“For me. I wanted to ask if you wanted it to be for us.”

“For us?” Iguazu asked, trying to figure out what he was getting into.

“I kept your eye.” Raven said in place of a real answer. Iguazu still understood what he meant.

“I think I’d like that.”

Raven put his old arms and legs on the third pyre he’d built before motioning to Iguazu. The former Red Gun put his eye in Raven’s old hand and closed his dead fingers around it.

“I’ll let you do the honors.” He stepped away from the three pyres. Iguazu lit the blow torch hidden in his hand and set the three of them alight. Then he stepped back as well joining Raven in the snow.

“You moved my brain.”

“Yeah, I did. Most standard issue conversions house the brain in the core. I didn't want it to be that obvious.”

“So where is it?”

“Where it should be.” He gently knocked on Iguazu’s forehead.

“Isn’t that even more obvious?”

“And yet Michigan blew a hole through your chest and not your head.”

“I did kill him, right?”

“You did. I gave him back to Nile to bury.” A spark popped loudly on one of the pyres. “He told me your name, if you want it.” Raven offered.

Iguazu looked at his silver hands, the reflections of the flames whirling over his fingers.

“Keep it. Knowing would defeat the purpose of burying him.”

They both stood there for a long time, until the flames turned to embers and the embers turned to ash, scattering in the cold wind. Raven leaned against Iguazu, the heat from his generators keeping them both warm.

Nile knew Michigan didn’t care how he was buried. They’d talked about it before, after all in their line of work it was an inevitability. Michigan had given a lot of answers for what he wanted done with his body, including: having his body taxidermied holding up his middle finger and displayed in the lobby of Balam’s corporate headquarters, having his body fed through a wood chipper and then shot at the next enemy AC the Red Guns fought “like confetti”, and launching it into space holding a golden record to “really freak out whatever aliens found the Voyager”. Nile had been as specific as with what he wanted as he could, actually taking the whole thing seriously. Michigan had gone quiet when he did, afterwards letting him know that he could bury him the same way if he wanted.

The first step was to wash him. Raven had told him that he probably shouldn’t look, but Nile needed to. He needed to show him the respect he deserved in death. Michigan was hard to recognize. His face was dark and swollen with bruises, the broken bones beneath his skin altering the familiar shape of him. Worst of all, he looked old. They both were old, far past the age they should’ve been jumping into an AC, but Michigan never looked it. With his boundless energy, he always seemed ten years younger than he really was, but that was gone now. It had been beaten from his corpse. Nile was gentle with him as he wiped the blood from his body, careful to avoid letting his broken bones tear his skin further. He talked to him as he worked, trying to make jokes, gently chastising him for making Red so upset. It kept him from crying. Michigan wouldn’t have wanted him to cry.

Once he was clean, Nile wrapped his body in a simple, white cloth shroud before letting Red in to say goodbye. He was a mess, tears and snot dripping down his face, cursing Iguazu, cursing Raven, even cursing Nile for not expressing his grief in the way Red wanted him to. Nile let him. He would probably regret what he said later and come to apologize, but he probably also needed a punching bag right now. Wu Huahai never showed. He was probably long gone already. Back in the Sol system, Mars must’ve been in retrograde. Of course Michigan’s MT squad came to say goodbye, Kennebec, Albany, Osawa and the rest, all bawling their eyes out. None of them had ever had a commander that cared about their well being before, let alone one that encouraged them to eject if things got too bad. Potomac was the only one who asked Nile how he was. He lied to him when he answered, telling him he was holding up alright considering the circumstances.

He prayed over the body alone.

Nile began to dig the grave himself. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. There were complex calculations involved. The grave needed to be perpendicular to earth, a planet so far away from here it wasn’t visible in the sky without a high powered telescope. Nile had never even been there.

His hands went numb from the cold as he cleared away the snow, but he kept going, fingers frozen until he couldn’t anymore. He’d hit permafrost. He tried to chip away at hard packed snow and ice with his shovel but he couldn’t muster the strength in his freezing arms. Still he was so absorbed in his task that he didn’t realize someone else was there until he climbed down into the grave with him.

It took Walter a few minutes to make his way into the hole Nile had dug in the snow. His bad leg made his progress slow and methodical. When he reached the bottom Nile just barely restrained himself from hitting him. How dare he. How fucking dare he come here now, when he remembered nights on Callisto where Michigan had smiled sadly saying “I wish he didn’t have so many damn secrets”, when Walter had called in favors to boost the prestige of his hounds without giving Michigan anything in return, when it was one of his hounds that killed him. Nile’s rage and grief overpowered his common sense and he grabbed Walter by the lapels of his long black coat. He didn’t fight back, he just looked at him with the same soul deep exhaustion that Nile felt.

“You can hit me if you want. God knows I deserve it.”

Nile pushed him away.

“That would make you feel better about it, wouldn’t it.” He tried to pick up the shovel again but his fingers wouldn’t wrap themselves around the wooden shaft.

“It needs to be within 24 hours right?” Walter began to strike at the ice with his cane, spiderweb cracks extending out from the steel tip. “Go warm yourself up. I won’t be able to finish this myself.”

Nile warmed himself in Walter’s just long enough to move his fingers again, but then got right out in the snow to keep digging. Walter had broken up the ice and frozen vegetation enough that it could be shoveled out of the hole, but the scar tissue that covered his back limited his mobility enough that he couldn’t move it without help. It went faster this way, with Walter breaking up the frozen ground as best he could and Nile shoveling, but it still took hours. When they were done, Nile lowered Michigan down, laying him on his side so that he faced towards Earth. Then, he climbed out of the grave and began to bury him. Dirt and snow of a foreign planet swallowing the man he loved forever. Walter offered him a cigarette when he was done. He took it.

Nile hadn’t watched the video yet. It was the last time he would hear Michigan’s voice, the last new words he would ever say to him. To watch it would be to acknowledge that he really was gone. Even though Nile had buried him, it still didn’t feel real. Michigan had wanted him to see it though and he had to honor that wish. He made sure he was alone when he queued it up on his comms pad. He didn’t need anyone to see him after he’d finished it.

Michigan sat in LIGER TAIL’s cockpit. The red of the emergency alarms flashing across his face making him look like a ghost.

“I love you Nile, I know I didn’t say it all that much when I was alive, but I hope you know I did. I think that’s my biggest regret. That and that I never managed to work up the balls to give you the ring I’ve got hidden in the mattress.” He wiped the sweat from his face, his eyes darting to track projectiles off camera. “Listen, I don’t want you to go trying to get revenge for me. I don’t need it and I don’t want it, but what you can do is live without regrets. Don’t make the same mistakes I made, Nile. You only realize it’s too late when your time’s already run out.” He stared directly into the camera. “I love you, Nile, take care of yourself.” The video ended.

Two messages from corporate popped on screen just as it did, the first congratulating him on his promotion to G1 and the second reprimanding him for spending hours of company time “for personal reasons” when he could’ve just had Michigan cremated. He threw his comms pad down in disgust and started feeling along the outside of their mattress. He felt his fingers pass into the crude slit Michigan had probably cut into it with a pocket knife and found a small square box. It was nothing special, just a simple gold band, but as he put it on, for the first time today Nile wept.

Walter got a call from Nile a few hours after they buried Michigan.

“I’m cashing in the favors you owe Michigan.” He said completely calmly, despite the redness of his eyes that told Walter he’d been crying.

“What do you need?” Walter asked. The guilt weighed so heavily on him that, short of killing himself on camera, he was willing to do anything.

“Passage off world.”

“Where to?”

“Earth.”

“You want to go to Earth?” Walter asked incredulously. “There’s barely anything there anymore, it’s a blighted wasteland.”

“I know, but Michigan wanted me to live without regrets, and I’ve always wanted to go there at least once.”

“If that’s what you want.”