"Fucking Federal criminals!"
"Republican pigs!"
"You should be in jail."
"You should be dead."
"If only we were that fucking lucky."
"Say that to my face, asshole."
Thank God for bartenders. "Oi, the first person that throws a punch, you're all out of here!"
This one probably stopped Evan from getting a fist to the face. The whole thing had devolved so quickly it almost made him dizzy. Dark and Stormy's friends had gotten defensive and then Evan's had and then suddenly there was no empty line down the middle of the bar.
There was just a bunch of angry soldiers from opposites sides of a war shoving one another and getting dangerously close to restarting the whole damn thing.
Dark and Stormy at least look annoyed at the way things were going, but he snapped at Evan when he turned back to him. "Can you just go back to your friends?"
"Look, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to start anything." Evan was famous for his horrible romantic timing.
And Dark and Stormy didn't look amused. In fact, his face darkened beyond its normal intensity. "Then why'd you come over? Were you trying to start a fight?"
"Because your cute!" It came out way louder than Evan had been expecting.
And naturally, in a lull in the arguing, so everyone, everyone, heard him.
Dark and Stormy sputtered, that pink blush becoming a searing red across his cheeks. His friends closest to them stopped and stared.
"Oh my god, are you serious? You were hitting on him?"
"Obviously!" Evan squawked. "What was confusing about it?"
Dark and Stormy's blush grew even worse. "You-, we're on different sides!"
"No, we're not! The war is over. It was horrible for everyone, but we're still here. And now we're together." There's another thing pretty much everyone knows about Evan. Well, everyone who's known him for more than a day. Or during a very short battle.
Evan 'Sunshine' Angel is a crier. Not, like overly emotional or insane kind of cry, just very in tune with his emotions. He was a sensitive kid, but he never dared to cry in the house he grew up in. The first time he'd cried at basic training he'd had a panic attack when the dill sergeant saw and had to be hospitalized. They didn't kick him out, but they had made him go to therapy for many years.
He was comfortable with this side of himself now.
….He was also six two and two hundred pounds of muscle so there weren't many idiots stupid enough to make fun of him.
And besides, when a soldier cried it was for a very good, very tragic reason.
Even now, with everything hanging over them, the minute Evan's eyes get teary the bar falls silent.
"You guys made Sunshine cry!" The tiny Japanese woman, who Evan recognized from years back, pointed an accusing finger at Dark and Stormy and his friends.
"What kind of people are you?" Billy demanded.
Even some of Republicans were starting to look guilty. Unfortunately, guilt didn't always manifest in healthy ways, so Evan jumped in to try and keep things calm.
"It's okay! Guys, no one made me cry!"
"Bullshit, Angel." Someone else yelled. "I saw you take a round to the shoulder, and you didn't even cry when they were stuffing krilex into the hole." People started moving again, posturing as the argument picked back up.
"Not helpful." Evan hissed in the direction of the voice.
"ENOUGH!" Even Evan jumped at Dark and Stormy's roar. "He-, what's your name?"
"Evan."
"Evan's right. There's nothing to fight about. We're all stuck together now."
Evan beamed at and Dark and Stormy stopped mid-sentence.
"Seriously, Sunshine? A Republican?"
Evan recognized that voice. "Shut it, Sasha. He's hot as fuck."
Dark and Stormy went back to blushing and his friends went back to looking exasperated.
"How about everyone goes back to their sides of the bar and I serve another round?"
Thank God for bartenders.
Evan felt hands pulling him back to the Federal side of the bar, before he could say anything and Dark and Stormy disappeared into the crowd before Evan could even ask his name.
***
The ship where this great experiment was going to take place was listed as ANSNEDDM-19962-76.1 in the official register.
Like the first ships of reeds and mud that had carried humans on their first voyage thousands of years ago, she wasn't much to look at. The baby of a wanna-be Frankenstein. Slapped together from salvaged pieces of ships destroyed in the war, she belonged to both sides and managed to look both like her fellow Mercy-class ships and not.
She was the best of the experiments and the worst of her class. In this age of peace and rebuilding, she was a threat. In an age of conflict, she would have been a promise. An epoch unto herself, everything was in front of her and the whole world was behind her and yet she existed in nothing. Coming closer and going away at the same time.
She was headed to heaven and hell, and she'd be blasting party music the entire way.
Made from tools of war, she was a mercy. To her crew of five hundred she would be home.
To her captain, a prison.
Official designation United Earth Sphere Mercy-class warship 19962-76.1.
They named her Loss.
A living tomb with more guns than most and large portion of her external decks made into a highly advanced research lab. She boasted a four-tier aircraft bay that made her comparable to the light carriers of the 1st and 4th Fleets, neither of which had survived the war on either side, and a hydroponic garden that took up nearly an entire floor and provided food on top of a peaceful resting place. She had six hundred crew rooms and a hundred diplomatic quarters.
She had four Hell Engines, a fission core, and a solar sail that guaranteed the only way she would ever run out of power would be in its moment of complete destruction.
They hadn't bothered to paint the outside, except for LOSS in large white letters, so you could see her scars on all sides.
~ tbc