I call her my Dream of Death. The others call her Tango. She calls herself Marguerite. We are dying.
She does not know this. She does not know I see the future, that I see the past. That we live in neither.
She pilots a beast of gleaming steel and shimmering energy and sends love letters of depleted uranium downrange in my direction at half the speed of light.
I ride in a sleek creature more air than metal, holding two blades, their tips throwing sparks up from mineral veins in the rocks around me. I ride fusion rockets in hundred-microsecond bursts. My blades tear her lethal envelopes asunder as they pass. It is all I can do not to cry at the beauty of it.
It has been this way since the mountain base – Marguerite, my Dream of Death, her fusillades that bore through heaven and earth but never time. And me, boring through time alone, seeing the sun and shadow throw curlicues around one another, inseparable and yet anathema.
I see it all, now.
Once I saw the future only as they told me I would. Tango’s heavy, vicious weapon would swing to just here and I would plant one foot here, no, here, and we would dance like this until one of us missed a beat.
It was Tango, then. A little later, Marguerite. In time, she became something else.
We fought again at a factory in some far-flung province with a hail of stars falling around us. She had learned from us, and though I could see precisely where the round would shatter glass and burst through concrete, she still imparted some impossible momentum that found my creature and bore us to the ground.
When later they pulled away the cratered plates, there were lines etched on the metal slug. “Ignore it,” they told me. Better if I had. But that night I had the dream, and every night since, and I had to know, and once I did I could not forget. She had written to me, inscribed my destiny on her bullet. Ours is a poor prophecy beside such a thing.
I know, still, that those we fight cannot see what I see. Even those alongside whom I fight see only a facet – one future, laid out, mere information enough for them to act. A future they can expect and depend upon.
But I see so much more: the future, and the past, and the dream. And in the dream my blades burn with curling scripts etched in fire, things of magic and myth, and Tango is the dragon that would burn me to ashes.
And yet each time we meet, I feel the dream pull me closer. I see the past, her calculation, nearly inhuman in its prescience, and the future laid out like a canvas between us. I see our tangled shells effervesce with heat and hate and something like destiny.
I see her.
She has beaten me in every version of this exchange, and she has died at my hands in every other version, until I can no longer tell any of them apart.
The others in my squad tell me I am merely exhausted, that the pressures of war have driven me past my limits.
But I have seen, and like a moth to a flame, I am drawn once more.
This story is fanfic for the game Phantom Brigade. You should totally buy it.
