Part Two: Life out of Balance

First Few Desperate Hours

May, 473 IC, Odin

Caribelle and Sebastian von Müsel were two average looking people with a less than average amount of money. What they lacked in excessive creature comforts, they could have made up for with love for each other, but that was not the case. They had married young because it had seemed like the most appropriate solution to their problems, and had stayed married because they lacked other viable alternatives.

They had two children.

The older child was a girl named Annerose. Even at eleven it was clear to people who looked at her that she would grow up to be stunningly beautiful. She had three true passions in life: embroidering delicate little images of flowers onto fabric, baking, and looking after her younger brother. In all things, she was fastidious and dutiful, and a perfectionist to her own detriment. When she found a flaw in her embroidery, she would pick apart and redo the section until the cloth was destroyed and the piece was ruined. When cooking dinner for her family, which she often did (as her mother usually had to retreat to a dark bedroom with headache and fever,) Annerose would stand over the stove, squint, and silently bite her lip until it bled as she struggled to resist the temptation to open and close the oven door to check on its contents, letting out the heat each time. She didn’t let anyone see her argue with herself; it was her duty as a woman, she believed, to be irreprochable before others, and to reproach herself for her mistakes. Where she had learned this belief, she wouldn’t have been able to say, but she held to it with a firmness that few eleven year olds hold to anything.

The younger child was the six year old Reinhard. Like his sister, he had an angelic look about him, especially when he was asleep. Sleeping, his blonde hair would curl around his cheeks, and his face would slip into the peaceful innocent expression of childhood. Awake, though, his blue eyes had a look that was incongruously fierce. He wasn’t a problem child, but he was too smart for his own good, and had difficulty making friends his own age. He preferred to spend his time with his sister. The two were joined at the hip.

When Annerose was born, there had been some talk that her two parents could not have produced such a baby. When Reinhard was born, though, that talk was forced to end, because the two children’s baby pictures looked nearly identical, and their mother was not well known for leaving her house.

There was plenty of other talk about the family, concerning mostly the finances of the father, which seemed to be in a constant state of trouble. There was money, somewhere, but there was also an ever shifting balance of debt that moved through the town, stopping at each merchant’s house like an unwelcome guest. Someone uncharitable might have said that Sebastian von Müsel was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, but in reality, he was simply acquiring money through the nebulous means of tugging on the strings of the family purse that had once been invested in Phezzani speculation, then spending that money a little too rapidly. As speculation is an unpredictable thing, and Sebastian was taking money out of the game without ever putting any back in, this situation grew less and less tenable as the years wore on, and his lenders in town became annoyed.

And so, with the excuse that the country air would help Caribelle’s fragile health, the von Müsels packed up their estate and moved to the countryside. They sold their house in town, used that money to pay off the most pressing of the debts, and then acquired a property that could be generously described as “a fixer upper”.

It had been a nice house, once: two stories tall, with graceful architecture and many windows, on a beautiful and large property. Unfortunately, its previous owners had allowed it to fall into complete disrepair, and it had lain empty and on the market for several years before the von Müsels took a chance on it.

They moved in on the hottest day in the summer, with a hired truck unceremoniously coming with their boxes of possessions and dropping them all in the center of the large living room, some stacked in such a precarious way that Annerose grabbed Reinhard’s arm to stop him from going near them, for fear that the whole construction would collapse and bury him underneath linens and pots and pans and books and whatever else had been worth bringing to this strange, new place.

At the time of their move, Sebastian had been the only person to lay eyes on the house. Caribelle had not cared to make the long trip to inspect it, and Sebastian had little patience for his children, so he alone knew the state of what they were walking into. Caribelle had trusted his judgement; this had been a mistake. When he took her upstairs to show her the master bedroom, a place with a cracked ceiling, windows that didn’t quite shut, and holes in the floors through which they could see the gleaming eyes of mice, the children downstairs could hear her first yell, then sob. Their father’s heavy footsteps stomped around above them, and each movement sent motes of dust or worse trickling down from the ceiling.

Annerose bit her lip. Her brother watched her as she looked through their pile of possessions, opened up a particular box labeled ‘bathroom’ and pulled out a bottle of bleach. She walked through the house, opening cupboards and closets and revealing long abandoned belongings of the people who had once lived here, eventually finding what she was looking for: a cobwebbed set of broom, mop, dustpan, and bucket. It was a good thing that these were here, because their father had not purchased any cleaning supplies, and both children knew that their mother, now that her sobs upstairs had quieted, would probably not be leaving her room to get anything, for any reason, for some time. It was the same pattern as usual, just under different circumstances.

With the determination that could only be born out of complete resignation, Annerose hauled the cleaning supplies into the large and filthy kitchen. She had to start somewhere, so it might as well be here. She opened the tap. There was a shaking sound throughout the house, a rattling of pipes, but no water came out. She clenched her hands into fists.

“Reinhard,” she said, keeping her voice clear and free of any sign of tears, though her brother could gauge her emotional state better than anyone else, and knew that she was struggling. “Take the bucket and go outside. Check if any of the hoses work, okay?”

He knew that she was half looking for real help, and half looking to just be left alone, so he nodded silently and took the bucket. It was quite large, and it bounced against his knees as he carried it two-handed out the door.

The outside of the house was in a better state than the inside, but only by virtue of the outdoor world appearing pristine even in disorder. Vines climbed the side of the house, and weeds that reached Reinhard’s knees hindered his passage around the building, looking for spigots he could fill the bucket with. He found one, kicking down weeds violently to get to it, and he tried it. There was the same rumbling, grinding sound, but no water.

Reinhard was a smart child, and he realized that there probably would be no water in any of the taps, but he had no desire to disappoint his sister, so he carried on his journey around the exterior of the house, checking all the hose outlets he saw. As he walked along the final wall of the house, he became aware that he was being observed. Peeking silently up over the top of the fence that separated the Müsels’ new home from their neighbors’ was a boy Reinhard’s age, with the brightest red hair Reinhard had ever seen.

The two boys stared silently at each other for a second, then Reinhard marched towards the stranger. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Siegfried Kircheis,” the redhead said.

“Siegfried Kircheis,” Reinhard said, considering the name. “It’s a common first name, isn’t it?”

The other boy didn’t seem to know how to respond to that, and Reinhard abruptly remembered a conversation he had had with his sister several days before: “You’ll try to be nice to the other boys, won’t you, Reinhard?” So, he corrected his course.

“But I like your family name. Kircheis. It sounds like the wind coming down over the mountains. That’s what I’ll call you.” Even with his best attempt to be nice to this stranger, he still had an imperious way about him, but he smiled.

“What is your name?” Kircheis asked.

“Reinhard von Müsel,” Reinhard said, and stuck out his hand to shake. Hesitantly, the other boy took it, and they moved their hands up and down in the charming imitation of grownup greeting that children sometimes did.

“Should I call you Reinhard?”

“If you like.”

“Then I will,” Kircheis said, with what seemed like determination. “Nice to meet you, Reinhard.”

“Nice to meet you, Kircheis.” It was a stiff and awkward introduction, but Reinhard was pleased that the other boy was following along with it. “Shall we be friends?”

“If you like.” Was it an intentional echo of his previous words? Kircheis’s little hands gripped the top of the white fence post as he leaned forward and smiled.

“Then we will be friends,” Reinhard said firmly. With that established, he felt as though he had at least one positive thing to report to his sister, though he still didn’t have any water, which was necessary for cleaning the house. He looked at the boy in front of him. “Say, Kircheis, now that we’re friends…” He stood on his tiptoes to peer over the fence, looking into the neighboring yard. He saw what he was looking for, a hose attached to a sprinkler system, and he pointed at it. “Can I borrow some of your water?”

Kircheis nodded, then immediately ran off towards the hose. With no hesitation, he disassembled the sprinkler system and dragged the hose over to the fence, where he draped it over the top so that Reinhard could fill his bucket. Without speaking, he ran back to the house and turned the water on. “Tell me when it’s full,” he called.

“Turn it off,” Reinhard yelled, when the bucket was so full that it was almost hard to carry. Obediently, Kircheis shut off the valve and came back over.

“What do you need the water for?”

“To clean the house.”

“Is it very dirty?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see?”

“No.”

Kircheis seemed to accept this, and nodded solemnly. “Will you need more?”

“Probably.”

“Should I wait here so I can give you more?” Kircheis seemed willing to do this, which didn’t make much sense to Reinhard, though it would be the most efficient solution for acquiring more water when he needed it. Again, though, in an effort to be friendly, he wasn’t going to order this other boy to stand guard over the hose until he might come back.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because you need me to turn on the water.” That hadn’t been the question Reinhard had been asking, but the wide-eyed way that Kircheis was looking at him answered the question all the same.

“Give me permission to climb over your fence,” Reinhard said. “Then I will be your guest, and I can turn on the water myself.”

“Okay.” He looked at Reinhard expectantly.

“What?” Reinhard asked.

“Can you climb the fence?”

“Of course.” To demonstrate, he put the bucket down and did so, though when he was laying across the top, swinging his legs over, with the pickets poking him in the stomach, he heard his sister calling his name.

“I’m over here!” Reinhard called, landing on the ground on the other side of the fence. Kircheis looked him over, then looked across the yard to where Annerose was coming around the side of the building.

“Reinhard!” she exclaimed, a false motherly tone in her voice that Reinhard liked. “What are you doing over there?”

“This is my friend, Siegfried Kircheis,” Reinhard said. “He has invited me to his yard so that I can use the water.”

Annerose leaned on the fence. “That’s very kind of you, Sieg,” she said.

“Kircheis, this is my sister, Annerose von Müsel,” Reinhard said.

Kircheis stared up at her with the same wide eyes he stared at Reinhard with.

“I’m very pleased that you will be a friend to my brother,” Annerose said, with a real smile, despite the redness around her eyes, like she had been rubbing them just a minute before. She reached out, touched Kircheis’s red hair. He froze for a second, like a deer caught in headlights, then dashed away, running around to the front side of his house, where he vanished completely.

Reinhard looked at where the boy had vanished to, then looked at his sister and shrugged.

“Come back over here,” Annerose said. “I could use your help, I suppose.” So Reinhard clambered back over the fence and followed his sister inside, slopping water from the heavy, over-full bucket onto his shoes on the way.

473- October 477 IC, Odin

Although Reinhard had somewhat assumed that Kircheis running away meant that he would not see the boy again, and that they were not actually friends as he had proclaimed them to be, that turned out not to be the case. Kircheis hovered around the edges of Reinhard’s life, always seeming to appear at the fence when Reinhard stepped out of his house. When Annerose released him from helping her with various tasks (“Because little boys should have time to play outside,” she said) he would always see Kircheis look up at the sound of the heavy front door opening.

They played together quite a lot, though it was a more serious and stoic type of play than might be expected from other young boys. Kircheis’s favorite game was to act out stories from books, though he always let Reinhard take the leading role. Reinhard insisted on following the script as accurately as possible, as though there was some kind of meaning to be gleaned from this activity. Reinhard enjoyed these games-- slaying an imaginary dragon with Kircheis by his side, or investigating a fake murder with rocks and sticks arranged on the forest floor to look like a body-- though he personally preferred simple physical contests and games, racing or swimming or fencing with branches. He usually won these contests, no matter what the activity was, and he would often grow annoyed with Kircheis when he thought that Kircheis wasn’t trying hard enough to beat him. Kircheis did win, sometimes, and Reinhard would always smile broadly and challenge him to a rematch.

Even when they weren’t playing, they enjoyed spending time together. Annerose would prepare lunch, and the three of them would sit outside on a blanket on the lawn (now that the lawn had been mown into submission) and just lay back and look at the clouds, or talk about nothing and everything. It was the kind of summer blooming friendship that seemed like it should be part of every childhood, but such things are rare, and this friendship was rarer still.

By the time that September rolled around, and school began, the two were inseparable. School came with its own set of issues. Although Reinhard was used to Annerose leaving to go to school every day in the previous years of his life, he became somewhat distraught when he realized that school was segregated by gender, and they would not even be in the same building during the day, nor be able to see each other at lunch.

It was only Kircheis’s presence that made the day tolerable. He didn’t like the other students, and he was too smart for the simple activities of class (he could already read and do elementary math), and so spent most of his day extremely bored. Relief from this boredom came only in the form of glancing across the room at his friend and watching what he was doing. Their eyes would meet across the rows of desks, and they would both smile, as though they were sharing a secret. Reinhard knew that acting up would not do him any good (the one time he had tried, Annerose had heard about it, and she had gotten so upset that she had actually cried in front of him), so he tolerated the days at school, as much as they felt like a waste of time.

In the beginning of the school year, he got into several fights with other students, some several years older than himself. He did not tolerate the kinds of schoolyard disrespect that were common fare in every classroom across the Empire, which meant that he retaliated when insulted, going directly for strikes that would inflict the maximum amount of pain with the least amount of risk to himself. Reinhard did not fight fair.

Whenever Kircheis saw that one of these fights was occuring, he would always rush in, yelling, “Reinhard!” At first, people thought this was because he was going to join in the fight on Reinhard’s side (as Kircheis was significantly taller than Reinhard was), but in reality, he often was the one to drag Reinhard away from fights that he was winning (or had already won).

After a while, the fights stopped. In part, this was because most of the boys in school had learned their painful lesson about teasing Reinhard. To Kircheis’s credit, though, he also had a hand in stopping the fights entirely, encouraging Reinhard to not sink to their level when insulted. The only insult that continued to have sticking power was anything directed not at Reinhard himself, but at his sister in the adjoining girls’ school.

Four years passed by in this fashion with a blink of an eye. By the time that Reinhard and Kircheis were both ten, they knew each other so well that they were a universe in themselves.

Annerose was not a constant companion, because as she grew older, she was able to justify going outside and simply enjoying the day with her brother less and less-- there was always something more to do around the house, with her mother in bed and her father out in town. She sometimes demanded Reinhard’s help, and he would always provide it more than willingly, but then she would be overcome with a kind of pity for keeping him indoors, and send him back out. Reinhard would sometimes cock his head and ask if she was sure, but that only seemed to firm up her belief that she should be the only one who had to stay indoors.

Reinhard did not enjoy spending time in his house, feeling like he needed to sneak around his mother so as not to aggravate her perpetual headaches, and not enjoying the occasional glimpses he caught of his father, who either stayed in his study or was out of the house on business that no other member of the family could understand or predict. Neither of his parents were cruel, but both of them were distant, which left Annerose to take up any responsibility they might have had towards their son.

Often, though, she was lax as a parental figure, because she was a child. When Reinhard asked her permission for something, she usually allowed it, no matter how much it would have been inappropriate for any other ten year old.

In this manner, one of Reinhard and Kircheis’s favorite pastimes became going on long weekend camping trips by themselves. It was somewhat unclear to Reinhard how Kircheis received permission to do such things, but he never asked, and simply trusted that his friend would resolve the question with his own parents somehow. They would leave on Friday afternoons after school, carrying their school bags full of all the needed supplies, take the hour-long train ride to the closest protected forest, hike a while in, then set up camp. They would stay out all weekend. If it was warm, they would swim and lay on the rocks around the lake. If it was cold, they would just hike or run. At night, they would build a fire and sit around it until they were too exhausted to keep their eyes open.

They went camping like this the third weekend in October, 477 IC. It was already unseasonably cold, and the weather looked somewhat unpromising, to the point where for the first time, when Reinhard had asked Annerose to let him go, she had almost refused. But he promised that he would keep warm, and that if the weather turned too much, they would take an early train home. So, she had reluctantly agreed.

Reinhard packed his bag on Thursday night, gathering all his camping gear from the closet where it was usually kept, then lingering in the quiet hallway of the house, listening for the sounds of his family members moving around. His father was out, somewhere, and his mother was asleep. Annerose was making a pot of tea in the kitchen-- he could hear even at a distance the sound of the water beginning to boil. Feeling secure, Reinhard pushed open the door to his father’s study and snuck inside. The place smelled musty, and it was dark, with only a hint of moonlight shimmering in through the curtained window. The carpet was coarse underneath his bare feet.

His father’s desk was an old wooden thing, too large to be easily moved, so it had come with the house when they moved in. He switched on the green-shaded desktop lamp, then pulled open the bottom drawer. He had seen his father open the drawer once, and had noticed that it appeared too shallow: a false bottom. Some other time, he had snuck into the room and peaked at what was inside the false bottom, having felt all around the drawer to find the clever little latch that would open it, and had found a blaster hidden in there. He didn’t know why his father had such a thing; he hadn’t ever seen him take it out of the drawer, but it had been nice to know it was there. Now, with nimble fingers, Reinhard took the blaster, tucked it in the bottom of his packed backpack, flipped off the light, and crept back to his upstairs bedroom, no one the wiser.

He kept the gun in his bag all through the day at school, told no one, and did not even really consider that this was a thing that he should not do. He simply wanted to bring it camping, and they were leaving directly after school let out, so it had to be in his bag, hanging in the back of the classroom right next to Kircheis’s. The day passed without incident. At the conclusion of the school day, he tugged on his jacket, took his bag, and left. He and Kircheis went to stand outside the entrance to the girl’s school to bid Annerose goodbye for the weekend, then they raced each other the half mile to the train station, bought their tickets, and shared a snack while sitting on the bench by the tracks, their bags at their feet and the cold October air biting their noses already. They didn’t really speak to each other during this time, or during the train ride itself. They had a mutual agreement that they didn’t like it when other people could hear them.

Kircheis had a book open on his lap, but mostly stared out the window, watching the scenery slide by, becoming more and more forested as they went. Reinhard read the book on Kircheis’s lap, with his head craned at an awkward angle, and every two minutes or so would reach over to flip the page.

They had about an hour of daylight left by the time they arrived and hiked to their preferred camping spot, so it was essential that they worked together quickly to set up their tent and get the fire going. Kircheis gathered firewood as Reinhard pulled things out of his backpack and cleared the ground. He caught a glimpse of the blaster in the bottom of his bag, and, while Kircheis wasn’t looking, he tucked it into his jacket pocket. He didn’t quite know why he was keeping it a secret from his best friend, but he felt that he wanted to save the reveal of it for the perfect moment, which was not this moment.

They sat around the fire as the last vestiges of sun vanished from the sky.

“We probably won’t be able to do this again until spring,” Reinhard said, with a combination of regret and honesty. Although the fire was plenty warm, the temperature differential between his front side and his back side was making him uncomfortable.

“Are you cold?” Kircheis asked, a look of concern on his face. He had been in charge of bringing the food, so he was boiling noodles in tin cups over the fire.

“Not exactly.” He prodded the fire with a stick, sending sparks flickering upwards, illuminating Kircheis’s flaming red hair. “I’m glad we were able to get out here, even if it is almost winter.”

Kircheis smiled at him. “Me too.”

“What should we do tomorrow?”

“Up to you.”

“You pick,” Reinhard said. “You always let me pick. It’s not fair.”

“I like doing anything,” Kircheis said.

“Anything?”

“As long as you do it with me.”

Every time Kircheis said something like that, Reinhard felt simultaneously warm and annoyed. “You know, Kircheis,” Reinhard said. “I could say the same thing. So you should pick. It’s even that way.”

Kircheis smiled. “Do you really want me to choose?”

“Yeah.”

He considered for a second. “We should go to the falls, then.” Two kilometers of hiking distant from where they were camped was a rather large waterfall. It was nicer in the summer, because then there was the opportunity for swimming, but it was a picturesque location all the same.

“You’re just saying that because I like the falls.”

“I like them too,” Kircheis protested. “And I don’t have any better ideas.” Kircheis was correct in obliquely stating that there wasn’t much to do on these camping trips besides walk somewhere and enjoy each other’s company, so it made little difference.

When the noodles were finished cooking, Kircheis pulled them off the fire carefully. He walked around to where Reinhard was sitting, and, rather than just hand him his cup and return to his previous place, sat down right next to him to eat, close enough that their shoulders and arms bumped. Reinhard reached up and gently pulled on some of Kircheis’s hair. “You look just like the fire,” he said. “Really pretty.”

Kircheis shivered a little.

“Are you cold?” Reinhard asked.

“Not exactly,” Kircheis said with a smile.

“Should I give you my jacket?”

“It wouldn’t fit.”

“Really?” Reinhard asked. “You’re not that much taller than me.” He shrugged off his jacket and goosebumps rose on his arms. “Try it on.”

“I’m already wearing a jacket,” Kircheis said, but he took his off, and they traded.

Reinhard immediately found wearing Kircheis’s jacket, still warm from his body and slightly too large, to be very pleasant. He pulled the collar of it up over his mouth, just for the feeling of being fully wrapped up and warm, but he liked the smell of it, as well.

Reinhard’s jacket fit Kircheis better than expected. Annerose had bought him a size too big, ever the pragmatist, saying, “Might as well have it fit you next year, too.” It was amusing for Reinhard to see his best friend wearing his clothes.

“See, it fits,” he said. “Are you warmer now?”

“Of course,” Kircheis replied with a smile. “Did you want it back?”

“No, you can wear it,” Reinhard said, picking up his noodle cup from the ground and beginning to eat. “Check the pocket.”

Kircheis obeyed, sticking his hands into both pockets. His hand closed around the blaster, and he pulled it out, a wide eyed look on his face. He turned it over in his hands delicately, as though it could explode.

“Is this real?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“My dad’s desk.”

“Does he know?”

“Probably not.”

“You had this at school all day?”

“Yeah.”

Kircheis hesitated a moment before asking his next question. “What were you going to do with it?”

Reinhard looked into his friend’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it might just be nice to have.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I wanted to surprise you.” The questions were getting on Reinhard’s nerves a little, in the sense that he felt Kircheis was upset at him, and he didn’t like that feeling at all. “Are you mad at me?”

Kircheis looked between the gun and Reinhard, then held it out for him to take back. “Sometimes I think I understand you, and sometimes I don’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve never needed something like that before,” Kircheis said. “Why now?”

“I don’t know.” Now Reinhard was frustrated with himself, his own inability to express the feeling that holding the gun gave him, the sense of control, like he could take whatever he wanted. He took the gun and put it into Kircheis’s jacket pocket. “Does it bother you?”

Kircheis considered this for a long second. “No,” he said. “I trust you.”

Reinhard was glad that he had given it real thought, and was doubly glad that that was the answer that Kircheis had ended on. “Good.”

The conversation turned to lighter matters as they ate their soup, and eventually the flames grew dimmer as they ran out of collected firewood to toss on the pile, and their eyes grew heavy, so they turned in for the night. They lay in the tent, fully clothed, draped in the large camping blanket that Kircheis had brought, arms tucked underneath their heads as they faced each other in the darkness.

The only sounds were the wind moving through the branches of the trees and over the fabric of their tent, and their quiet breathing. Reinhard reached across the distance between them and pulled on a lock of Kircheis’s hair again, though he couldn’t see its red color in the near complete darkness. Kircheis shifted a little at the touch, which caused Reinhard’s palm to brush his cheek; he could feel him smiling.

“You trust me, Kircheis?” Reinhard whispered, though he didn’t know why he needed to.

“Yes,” Kircheis said. “Always.”

“I’m glad you came with me.”

“Would you have gone alone?”

Reinhard considered the question. “If I had to. But it wouldn’t be for fun.”

Kircheis nodded, Reinhard’s hand still tangled in his hair. “I’ll always come with you, then.”

“Why?”

“Just because.”

Reinhard might have protested or asked more, but he was tired, and underneath the blanket was warm, and so he just nodded and closed his eyes. He was asleep almost instantly.

In the morning, Reinhard woke to discover that, since he had been slowly tugging the blanket off of his best friend, Kircheis had scooted right up next to him and had thrown his arm over Reinhard’s side. Sunlight was streaming in through the fabric of the tent, putting a warm, golden glow on everything. Reinhard stayed that way for a long few minutes, just watching Kircheis sleep, but a pressing need to get up eventually forced him to wiggle out from underneath Kircheis’s arm, not waking him up, and leave the tent.

It was very cold outside. The leaf litter on the ground was covered by a hard, crunching frost, and Reinhard’s breath rose in great white clouds around his face. When he went to go gather firewood, he realized that he was still wearing Kircheis’s jacket from the night before, but he had no real desire to take it off. Kircheis emerged from the tent when Reinhard got the fire going, woken either by the smell or the sound of it.

“Good morning,” Reinhard said as he boiled some water.

“Sleep well?” Kircheis asked.

“Yeah. Coffee?” It might have been inappropriate for ten year olds to drink coffee, but Reinhard had been helping himself to the leftovers of the pot that his father made every morning since he had been old enough to reach the cream on the top shelf of the fridge.

“Sure,” Kircheis said. Reinhard dumped two packets of instant coffee into the boiling cups of water. He passed one to Kircheis, and the two sat next to each other and silently held the mugs in their cold hands, feeling like they were gaining more nutrition from the warmth than from the beverage. Reinhard pulled out their container of granola and put it on the ground in between them, and they took turns eating handfuls.

The day warmed marginally as the sun climbed over the tops of the trees, to the extent that, on their vigorous hike to the falls, they both unbuttoned their jackets. They took turns carrying the bag that held their lunch. As they walked, they would devise little challenges for each other, like seeing who could walk more steadily across a fallen tree over a muddy depression in the ground, or who could make it to the top of a giant cracked boulder first. It never mattered who won, and they both laughed at the outcomes regardless.

Eventually, they arrived at the falls, water tumbling down over steep rocks into a turbid pool, then continuing on its way as a thick channel cut into the rocky earth. They both knelt down at the edge of the rapids and drank, hands going numb immediately from the ice water as they cupped it to their faces. They sat back and ate their lunch, growing colder now that they weren’t moving, so by instinct they moved closer to each other.

“I love this place,” Reinhard said, looking at the falls. “It’s beautiful.”

Kircheis nodded in agreement, though he wasn’t looking out at the falls, and was instead looking at his friend.

When they were so cold that they could no longer bear to sit still, they began their walk back to their camp, though Reinhard glanced back behind them at the falls with some regret. “We should camp here next time,” he said. “In the summer. Then we can wake up and just go swimming.”

“Sounds nice,” Kircheis said.

Their return journey was slower, and they spent more time strolling than they did running. This quiet journey allowed them to observe the natural world around them a little more. Without their crashing and yelling through the trees, they didn’t scare away quite as many birds. When they were about three quarters of the way back to their camp, Kircheis put his hand on Reinhard’s arm and stopped him from moving, pointing off the path and into the undergrowth of the forest.

There was a deer there, a doe, walking slowly by, about thirty meters distant, half obscured by the branches of the pine trees that surrounded them. The whole world seemed to still.

Reinhard’s hand closed around the blaster in Kircheis’s jacket pocket. He pulled it out, holding it with both hands in front of him as he took aim.

“Reinhard—” Kircheis whispered, clutching his arm.

“Should I kill it?”

“No!”

“What would you do if I did?”

Kircheis was silent. Reinhard glanced at him, saw the worried look on his face, felt his grip on his arm. Reinhard dropped his aim, then tried to hand the gun to Kircheis with a smile. “You take it.”

Kircheis hesitated and shook his head, but Reinhard kept offering it, and eventually he relented and slipped the gun into his own pocket. His hand went to it over the fabric several times, hovering as though to check that it was there.

The two stood and just watched the deer slowly meander through the trees, until a sudden loud bird call startled it, and it dashed off and was lost in the brush. They started walking back towards their camp again, even more slowly, this time.

“Why did you want to kill it?” Kircheis asked, voice so low that Reinhard almost didn’t hear him.

“Because it was beautiful,” Reinhard said, this reason making perfect sense in his own mind. Kircheis tilted his head, asking for further explanation. “I wanted it to be mine.”

It hardly mattered that they had no use for a dead deer, and would not have been able to get it back home, and that it would no longer be as beautiful once he had shot it—none of those qualifiers changed anything about the way that Reinhard saw the situation. He knew this as well as Kircheis did, and so Kircheis’s next question was different.

“Then why did you let me stop you?”

“Because I trust you.” That answer encompassed everything that Reinhard could have wanted to say. He valued Kircheis more than he valued the possession of a deer. He didn’t want to upset him. He knew Kircheis’s judgement was often sounder than his own.

“If I hadn’t been here, would you have killed it?”

“Maybe,” Reinhard said, and he looked away from Kircheis, not wanting the other boy to judge him.

“Even though you knew I wouldn’t want you to?” He sounded a little sad.

“How could I have known?”

“If you didn’t know that I didn’t want you to, you wouldn’t have stopped and asked.”

Reinhard considered this statement and found it to be true. He nodded solemnly. “Maybe I wouldn’t, then.”

“Promise me?”

“Promise what?”

“That you won’t do things like that?”

Reinhard stopped walking and faced his friend. He held out his hand, and Kircheis took it. “I promise I won’t do anything you wouldn’t want me to.”

That didn’t seem to satisfy Kircheis, who shook his head. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what do you want me to promise? I’ll promise anything.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to force you to do things.”

“I want to do things that make you happy. Let me promise you something. Whatever you want.”

Kircheis shook his head, and Reinhard was stymied. “You shouldn’t just do things because I want them,” Kircheis said. Reinhard frowned and Kircheis continued, “Don’t you know the difference?”

“The difference between what?”

“Reinhard—”

“Kircheis?” Reinhard was genuinely concerned that he had upset his friend. He wanted to reach out and touch his hair, lighten the mood, but Kircheis was holding his hand in an iron grip.

“It would have been evil to kill the deer because you thought it was beautiful.” He shook his head. “Don’t you know that?”

“Oh.” Reinhard had not been considering that at all. He smiled. “Okay. I get it.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” If Kircheis wouldn’t want him to do something, then it might be evil, so he wouldn’t do it. It was as simple as that. He was sincere in this belief, and it showed on his face and in his voice. “I won’t do evil things, then. I promise.”

Kircheis smiled in relief. “Good.”

“You trust me?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

They kept walking. Kircheis didn’t let go of his hand, but Reinhard didn’t feel any need to let go either, so their clasped hands just swung between them as they went.

Later that night, when they were sitting next to each other in front of the fire, staring into it, sitting as close as they could to it without burning themselves, Kircheis still was pensive and thinking about the afternoon’s incident. Reinhard could tell that he was, because his hand kept going to the gun in his jacket pocket, touching it over and over just to confirm its presence, and then glancing over at Reinhard, as if he were looking for something else.

“What are you thinking about?” Reinhard asked after a while.

Kircheis turned to him, the light from the fire flickering across his blue eyes. “You.”

“What about me?”

“Do you really want to destroy things just because they’re beautiful?”

“No,” Reinhard said. “I want to keep them.”

“But those aren’t the same things.”

Reinhard considered this for a second, and tried to put it in words. “If I kill the deer, it’s mine in a way that it can’t be for anyone else, forever.”

Kircheis hesitated. “There are other ways to have that.”

“Maybe,” Reinhard agreed.

“And you want that for everything that’s beautiful?”

“Just the things I love.” Reinhard paused, and leaned closer towards Kircheis. “Do you think that’s wrong?”

“No,” Kircheis said. “Not those other ways.”

“Good.” He reached up and twisted one of Kircheis’s curls. “Kircheis…”

“Yes, Reinhard?”

Reinhard looked into his friend’s eyes for a second, then quickly leaned forward and pressed a fleeting kiss to Kircheis’s mouth. He backed off immediately, blushing, but said, “There. Now you’re mine in a way that can’t be anybody else’s.”

Kircheis touched his own lips with his fingers, as though confirming by some other means what had just happened. He didn’t say anything for a while, and Reinhard looked at him, with worry mounting in the pit of his stomach.

“Did I do the wrong thing?” he asked, finally, after a prolonged silence.

“No,” Kircheis said.