[b]Kinshasha[/b]

“You realize Hale, that you really don't need to beat around the bush.” Paston remarked as he walked in towards the center of the room. He set down a ceramic cup onto the deep rose-red wooden table that sat at the room's very center. Atop a leopard skin rug it gave an air of considerable lost colonial authority. But Paston didn't stop moving as he wandered off to the irregular thump of his gait.

“Yes, well I was... uh-” Hale started. He fumbled across his tongue, spilling out uncertainty. “I was simply being thorough is all.” he sighed defeated, “And you don't make it any fucking better, do you realize that?”

“I fail to see where I'm the problem.” the ghoulish doctor remarked dryly as he stood in front of some well-worn sound-system. A giant case mounted with speakers that was nearly as large as a dresser. At the far end of the room it had its own dominating space at its wall. Where bookshelves normally would have stood stacked high alongside trophies and framed photographs there was a stark nothingness. The only other occupant to this room the pair of windows that let in the soft Kinshasha evening sun. The city outside was burned in an orange marmalade glow. The Congo River was especially bright in its beaming glow. And beyond it, the sister city of Brazzaville with its long-lying high-rises and tree-lined avenues.

In every reality, Kinshasha and Brazzaville were much the same. No fundamentally different than Arlington and DC in America. But colonial divisions from the 19th century had rendered them two starkly different political entities. Even as the GSF lorded over both. And from it: total control of the Congo River.

“You're not very... Encoura-” Hale started before Paston spun from in front of his toy, a look of fire on his gnarled wrinkled face.

“Encouragement my ass boy! We're the real world now!” he shouted. His voice rattled the room. Its weight carried ghosts, the ghosts of a drill instructor, “For fucks sake don't go on encouragement. Pussy footing doesn't grow a fucking man. Grow some balls Hale and assume for a moment that we're not complete morons. You got nothing to prove.”

Hale sighed, lowering his eyes from off of Paston's cold criticizing stare. “Fine.” he puttered. “Well, what are we drinking?” he asked, pushing aside the previous topic hastily. He looked down at the non-descriptive mug and the clear liquid inside.

“Waragi.” Paston replied. He held up in a gloved hand a cassette tape. Turning it over in his fingers and close to his skeleton eyes to read the faded label.

“Oh, so you broke out the hard gin.” Hale laughed nervously.

“More to my benefit than yours. But if you would like a shot I keep the gin in the cabinet over there.” Paston directed, pointing to a glass case besides a tall door.

Paston's apartment in Kinshasha was something washed out of the turn of the century. It was an old building, one of the older ones left standing in Kinshasha during its waves of attempted modernization and the sprawl of chaotic shanty construction that spread out into the hills and forests around the city's core like the outwardly spun dress of a black African flower. Many had caught Paston bragging that these halls had seen the aides of Joseph Mobutu almost a century ago, if not Mobutu himself.

The building – and his sitting room even – had a certain transitional appearance to it. Situated just near to the banks of the Congo River and three stories over the street it looked out first on a canopy of African junipers and ironwoods. Then to the muddy shores of the Congo. If one pressed their head against the glass just right, they might be able to peer down through the boughs of the trees to the vendors on the street just below.

With a tall cathedral ceiling the room echoed, and it was only more pronounced as Paston put in his tape into his monolithic player and hit the switch. With a warbled sigh it turned on and spun to speed, reading off the magnetic tape of a over-worn cassette tape. Where Paston ever found them was a mystery unto itself.

The notes of an erratic if regular piano began its beat and stole the space of the room, taking full advantage of the room's echo and despite the worn distortions of the music began to take a concert feel as guitar and drum came to full yawn with a alien funk.

“I always liked [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmw7gSDRnTA]Heroes[/url].” Paston smiled as he limped from the player, “Wouldn't you agree?” he asked Hale as he took his seat and reached out for the Waragi.

“I've never really known anyone who listened to as much David Bowie.” Hale expressed dryly, “Infact I don't know if I knew anyone who listens to him.”

“It is well passed his time but if people can keep listening to Chopin and Mozart then I see no reason why not to.” mused the doctor, waving his glass of Waragi, “Especially past the end of the war. When the nuclear EMPs killed the computers and the old servers I don't know how much of the old data remains. The only reliable medium that ever plays is what came in a tangible format.”

“Yes, but why even care about before?” Hale contested with disbelief, “There's a reason its dead. And I don't feel sorry for its loss.”

“Well Hale Salbert, it's because some of us lived back then.” he tapped his cup of Waragi against his head. Hale shivered to even look at his scarred visage. And without his usual hat or mask there was something unnerving and skull-like about his head. If it weren't for the spectral remnants in his face, he was all but without feature. Or ears even.

“Well bullshit, you're all relics.” Hale grumbled bitterly.

“Well if it wasn't for us then you wouldn't be here, remember that.” Saxson pointed out observantly, “Even if your dear mummy and daddy where to meet then you might be in some shittier place. Fucking Europe, or god forsake-us all: the US or Russia. There's plenty of places the nukes touched and you might just end up turning into a worse monster than I by the time you turned thirteen.”

“Right, and having to deal with you makes it any better.”

Paston laughed, “I think we lost tracked of why we're both here even. Was this for drinks or to continue the same sort of bickering as we started in conference?”

“Why does it matter though?” Hale groaned, “Maybe I should be in Europe, or America. Maybe I'd be doing better?”

“Better doing what? Clawing over some lost legacy at the behest of morons?” Paston laughed, “You undersell yourself, that's your flaw. Then you undersell ourselves to us, or so you try. Fucking stop. There, that's you're fucking positive encouragement. Are you fucking happy?”

“Jesus P-” Hale started.

“No- no. Just stop there for God's sake before I bust my cane across your face.” urged Paston impatiently, “I think we're both about done with the bullshit. So let's play a game. How about we try to act like men and beguile each others with stories?

“I did want to drink and you aren't going off to some mid-Kinshasha bar.”

Hale sighed, and leaned back into the couch. He ran his hands along the leopard skin draped across it. It was fake, that much he knew. “Ok, how do you want to play?”

“One thing you'd change.” Paston smiled, taking a healthy drink of the African gin in his cup. “You go first as my guest, and I'll offer you one thing of mine. Whatever you want. Chick you should have lost your virginity to, offers you should have taken, things said. Now: go.” he leaned forward expectantly with a grin that looked for to evil for this sort of game. But Hale conceded.

“Well...” he started, he stuttered on his word before they even came out. And they retreated down his throat to choke him over what he thought to say. Biting his lip he reconsidered, and searched for a new avenue. “I probably should have said goodbye to my folks before they left.” he admitted.

“Why, what happened? Or rather, what was it they did?” asked the doctor.

“My mother was working with Doctors Without Borders, but what they ran out here got swallowed up by Saxsen when shit hit the fan. Father was one of his employees. They got hitched, had me.”

Hale sighed long and low as he looked up to a lion's head that hung over the left door, between two bookshelves stacked high with all sorts of material. For a moment he distracted himself wondering if Paston ever had time to read that much material, or if were merely decorative. “They both left when I was maybe eleven, or twelve.” he said, getting back on point, “I probably should have said something when they went to head north. There was a need for doctors up around in Gabon and Saxen took it into his head he could oblige and put some relief effort. But they got attacked and they both were killed.” Hale finished with a dry suppressed voice. A part of him was still sad, still mad. But in all the thought dried the whole of him out. But that deeper voice could not help but voice itself.

“There was a lot of that.” Paston admitted, taking a heavy drink as Bowie continued to play in the background, “Would it be a surprise that by chance I was part of that expedition?”

“You were?” Hale asked.

“Probably not close to your parents, different team. I was but a battle-field medic there for security support. But the point stands: I was there.

“To be topical I'd say what I'd like changed about that was either I didn't get my knee shot out, or they didn't burn me. I could decide which.”

“How could you not want to be burned?” a shocked Hale exclaimed, “It seems like for sure that would be the thing to change.”

“Well, see here: I've come to enjoy field retirement.” he laughed, “I could have done with just being shot in the knee and that'd be the end of it. I could have played dead then and maybe I would have been left alone. Or they would have got straight to it and someone could have claimed I magicked someone's penis off of them earlier so they could get to the torching earlier.

“But as it was I and my unit all got burned.”

“I don't believe I ever was told the story.” Hale wondered, if grimly. His stomach was knotting at the thought of it. Smiling, Paston rose to his feet and picked up his cane, hobbling to the glass liquor cabinet.

“Well, we were entering some little village east of Libreville, Gabon.” Paston began, taking out a bottle as he leaned on the ivory cane, “It was about high-afternoon and an advanced team had gone through with helicopters and shot up the parts of Gabon's military that didn't want us there. So there was a lot of wounded to attend to. Me and my unit's role was to move in and hold the position and do what humanitarian shit we needed.

“But I don't know what went wrong. Sometime between getting off the ATV and moving to the first victims someone shouted something. I didn't notice it at first. But as I approached the house they were housing some of the wounded I felt something explode in my knee and all the sudden I couldn't stand as my leg exploded in pain.

“I didn't lose it, obviously. But for all the blood and gore it was probably there only on a few tendons. I lay in the dust screaming in agony. And a second or ten after gunshots went off.

“One way or another I and a few squad mates were dragged off. And these people were screaming about penis-thievery or some such insane shit. We were thrown onto some concrete block, and gasoline was poured over us and we were set on fire.

“Now, I couldn't move, so imagine how painful this all was.” he scoffed dismissively as he carried over his glass of waragi, “But I got out, and I curse everyone there that day for not pulling out anyone else, or leaving just me. Fucking bastards, I fucking tell you.

“One thing to another, I survived. Burned, cranky, sour, and a stick up everyone's ass. I could have done with one or the other but not both: because I do enjoy this 'retirement'.”