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"Do you kiss babies, too?" Sol said afterwards, seated in one of the folding chairs neatly arrayed around the war table in Ky's tent. Ky looked up at him with a tired, familiar consternation -- a look that said clearly "now what?" -- but he smiled and shook his head all the same. His uniform was grubby and bloodstained, coated entirely on one side by the thick black goo that only Gears bled, and there was a light in his eyes that Sol couldn't quite read. It made him nervous.
"Why?" Ky said, passing him the bowl of cold water he'd acquired from the platoon's supplies. Sol took it between his palms, rubbing the rough ceramic slowly in a circle. The cold leeched into his skin for a moment, little pinpricks of ice, and then his own internal heat flared up and replaced it, and the bowl grew hot between his fingers. Ky watched him as steam rose up off the water, and then turned to grab a towel, folding it across his hands as he offered them out to Sol again.
"It's something politicians do," Sol said, passing the bowl back. Ky set it on the table with the graceful precision that accompanied all of his movements, not spilling a drop or scalding himself even a little. The light of the lanterns put an orange-red glow into his dusty pale hair as he bent his head. "You know, walking around, shaking hands -- kissing babies."
"That isn't what this was," Ky said. He was unbuttoning his coat and shrugging it off without even looking to see if Sol was watching, which meant that this was the arena of conversation and ordinary soldier-in-the-field ablutions, rather than something more untoward. When he pulled off his undershirt Sol saw the four deep claw marks across his ribs, red and still scabbing at their deepest points, and he remembered how much worse that might have been, had Ky not been Ky. There was new bruising down his sternum as well, discoloration across his flat stomach, and Sol knew it went all the way down to his thigh. He'd seen the impact of the fall.
"This wasn't something I wanted," Ky was saying, and Sol straightened, lipping the unlit cigarette clenched between his teeth. The boy was frowning now, watching the ripple of the water as he dipped his cloth into the bowl and began to wash the grime from his shoulders and underarms. "It just happens, sometimes."
Sol laughed. "Just happens," he repeated. "Look, my German's not great, but those people were calling you Jesus goddamn Christ, Ky."
"I'm fairly certain that 'goddamn' isn't a part of any of Our Lord's titles," Ky said, unruffled by the obscenity, or by the blasphemy. Exposure to disease, he'd once told Sol, did wonders for making one immune. "In any case, they were wrong."
"It sure made them happy to see you."
Ky gave him an uncomfortable glance, once hand pressed against his own neck, the cloth dripping warm water down his chest. His skin gleamed golden in the light. "That may be," he said softly, "But I make no claims of... of inappropriate sanctity. I tried to discourage them, but Major Geund was translating, and..."
"And he doesn't disagree," Sol finished for him. He'd seen the way Major Geund looked at High Commander Kiske, all right. "Well, fine. As long as it gives them hope, right?"
The boy didn't respond to that, and for a while the only sound in the tent was the flicker and spit of the lantern wicks, and the quiet splashing and dripping of Ky's bathing. It had been a wildly successful campaign -- a victory of human life and few casualties after three days worth of hunting and being hunted by strange new Gears they'd never seen before, things with long, powerful hind legs equipped with gleaming talons, and roaring, raging mouths shaped like the beak of a squid, others the size of elephants, with grasping, simian-like hands and gaping hippopotamus mouths. The liberated city had poured forth from its previously sealed gates, and the only word on the lips of the celebrating citizens, the only name they raised alongside that of God, had been "Kiske."
He'd watched Ky walk among them, gleaming white and pale on the muddy, bloodstained cobblestones, the late afternoon sunlight touching his hair and raising a halo of gold in reflection. He'd watched as the boy laid his hand on the tops of bowed heads, as men and women wept and clutched at the hem of his tattered cloak, as he'd leaned down to kiss the cheek of an old woman too weak to stand and meet him, and she clutched her chest over her heart and wailed aloud. He'd watched as they'd mobbed him, clustering so close and with such urgent desperation that Ky's officers had been needed to push them back, lest the boy be trampled to death.
Messias, Messias, they'd cried. Heilig Messias. And the last remaining bell in the city's central church had rung, endlessly, and still echoed in Sol's head now.
"Yes," said Ky, holding his cloth loosely between both hands, head bowed. "I suppose the outcome is what's important." He held out his sword arm in front of his face, turning it over. There was a deep cut on the underside, grubby from lack of attention, and he began to clean it himself, wincing a little at the sting. "Morale is an army's most valuable weapon."
"It's not," Sol said. He plucked the cigarette from his lips and put it away, back into his pack with a care to rival Ky's own. "Its leader is."
The boy looked up at him, and there was such an anguish on his face in that moment that Sol blinked and leaned back, feeling almost physically propelled.
"Do you think so?" Ky asked him, voice soft. His fingers gripped the edge of the water basin. His knuckles were white. "I don't feel that way at all. A leader is only the sum of his people, Sol. A leader is only the will of his people given shape and form." His expression had twisted -- disbelieving, and oddly betrayed. "He should be what he is needed to be when he is needed to be it. Nothing more and nothing less."
"Kid," Sol said, and the boy's head lifted in a jerking motion, like a defiant young horse preparing to prance away from a bridle. Sol lifted his hands a little, shaking his head.
"I didn't mean anything by it," he said.
For a long moment Ky looked at him, head held imperiously high, and Sol could see the thunderstorm passing through his eyes.
"I didn't ask to be called such things," he said at last. His voice shook faintly with the righteousness of his conviction. "I will be it if they ask me to be, but I did not seek it for myself."
"Shit," Sol said, "You think I don't know that?"
The unstudied relaxing of Ky's indignant shoulder position told him he'd discovered at least part of the problem, though the rest remained elusive, as Ky turned away from him again.
"I'm tired," he said. There was a young and plaintive note to the words, as though he were hoping Sol wouldn't make him beg, as though he were hoping that Sol would understand that he was exhausting to deal with, and not entirely in ways that had to do with petty bickering and disobedient battlefield behavior. "I will speak with you in the morning." He sat down on his cot, dropping his cloth on the table next to the basin, and picked up his journal from the ground next to it. He held it between his hands without opening it, looking pointedly at the worn leather cover.
Thoroughly dismissed and knowing better than to resist, especially when his presence in Ky's personal space was by such a tremulous invitation in the first place, Sol got up. His knees clicked in protest at the movement. He lifted the tent flap, but something made him turn back before he went back out into the humid night.
"I say," he said, unable to keep the reproach out of his own voice, "If you were really as Godly as everyone thinks, you'd be a hell of a lot less disagreeable, Kid."
Ky looked up again, and he tipped his head slightly to one side, considering Sol with that discomforting and natural superiority that swept away all memory of his age or his more vulnerable moments, and left behind only the really uncomfortable feeling of being looked at patiently from a very ornate pulpit. There was a smile glimmering on his lips.
"Go away, Sol Badguy," he said, without rancor.
Sol went.