Excerpt: Arcadian

There was a man asleep in a chair beside his bed, he noted with the first stirrings of surprise he had felt since he’d woken. His head was turned away from him, his face obscured by a unruly mass of brown hair. Arkadiy found himself feeling vaguely insulted that the man had fallen asleep beside him without even a simple introduction. It could be worse though, he supposed: he could have been in bed next to him.
The sharp click of heels on a hard, polished floor drew his attention away from the stranger and he tried to crane his head to see who was making the sounds and whether they were attractive. If only there wasn’t a curtain in the way - wait, why was there a white curtain in here anyway? He frowned, but the frown disappeared like mist under the sun when Vanya peered around the curtain, biting her lower lip. Her eyes widened as she saw him. “Captain Olenov! You are awake!”
“Yeah, I am.” His mouth felt as though it’d been crammed full of cotton wool, but at least the words were recognisable. Vanya moved fully around the curtain and Arkadiy’s eyebrows rose as he took in her doctor’s outfit and clipboard that she was hugging to her chest. “Playing doctors and nurses? You didn’t invite me...” He pouted.
She smiled and shook her head, then pushed her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose. “You are irrepressible, Captain Olenov.”
Somewhat irritated at being unable to move his arm, he gestured with his head instead at the man sleeping on the other side of the bed. “Who the hell is he?”
It wasn’t that her face fell as such, it was more a subtle change of expression that made Arkadiy feel like he had seven years before when he had woken up in a small, unmemorable hospital on a distant desert planet, when he had first tried to flirt with the pretty Doctor Lebedeva. “Captain Olenov - Arkadiy - he...” Her voice was soft, not calming so much, it seemed, as she seemed to be hoping that he wouldn’t take it badly. “He rescued you.”
“He... What?” Arkadiy glanced from the doctor to the sleeping man and back again, not noticing her use of his first name.
“He rescued you,” she repeated, carefully laying the clipboard on the bed beside his right knee.
It was only that gesture that made him realise that something was wrong. The pressure of the clipboard pressing the blanket to his right knee suddenly prompted his brain to comprehend that there was nothing for the material to press against on the left side. He raised his head and stared down at the fall off of material halfway down his thigh. “F^@*.”
“That is one way of describing it,” Vanya sighed, moving around the bed and over to the stranger, reaching out with one long fingered hand and gently shaking his shoulder until, with a startled yelp, the man awoke.
Arkadiy paid no attention. “Uh. This might be a stupid question but... Why am I tied down?”
Vanya glanced over at him, and sighed softly. “It is difficult to explain. You had what might be called, ah,” she paused, giving Arkadiy the kind of clinical look he hadn’t seen since she was delving into one of his new legs with a screwdriver, “an interesting reaction.”
“To what?” He knew it might be a bad idea to ask, but couldn’t resist nonetheless.
Vanya said nothing and simply gave him a sympathetic look that made him begin to worry. The man beside her groaned and pushed the hair from his face with one careless hand, looking over his shoulder at the restrained man. “He’s awake?”
Remembrance crashed into Arkadiy like an avalanche as he stared across at that purple eye. Beginning to struggle as if he was possessed, cursing the restraints, he managed to spit out, “Havoc you b@$^*#d, just wait!”
The brown haired man gave Vanya a long suffering look. “Are you going to explain this to me now? This is the second time he’s looked like he’s going to kill me, so I think I deserve one.”
“It is what you might call complicated.” The doctor said, turning to Arkadiy and crouching beside his head. “There is some trauma involved.”
“Some?” The black haired man almost choked on the word. “The b@$^*#d tried to kill me! And you! He killed my best friend!”
“I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about.”
Vanya reached out and gently shifted some of Arkadiy’s unruly fringe from his face. “It is true, Captain Olenov. This man is not Havoc.”
“How can you say that?” he hissed, not looking at the blonde doctor but at the man now standing behind her. “It’s Havoc. Same face, same eyes, everything!” No matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t rip his hands from the restraints and the ones against the chest were restrictive enough that his breathing was becoming laboured. It didn’t matter.
The brown haired man rested his hand on Vanya’s shoulder and almost grudgingly she rose and stepped aside. Crouching beside the bed in the same place the doctor had occupied only seconds before, he said softly, “I don’t know who Havoc is, but I assure you, I am not him.”
“You’ve got purple eyes,” Arkadiy growled, his own narrowing.
“No. I’ve got a purple eye. Singular.” Before the soldier could disagree, the man raised his eye patch.
Arkadiy was taken aback despite himself. In a universe where most injuries could be treated without blemish or disfigurement, the sight of such a large scar as encompassed the stranger’s eye was a shock. The eye itself, hidden by the patch, was strange by itself, a pale grey iris with no pupil, and clearly sightless. “What-”
“Does this look familiar to you?” The man asked, before the soldier could start his sentence. When Arkadiy grudgingly shook his head, the man lowered the patch, a red flush slowly rising in his cheeks. “I hate doing that. Everyone always looks like you just did, damn it.”
“You could have lost it in the last two years,” Arkadiy grumbled, but the more he heard the man spoke, the less he found himself secure in his previous conviction. The mannerisms were different, the tone of voice didn’t match, and above all Havoc would never admit embarrassment, even under duress.
“With this scar?” The stranger sounded incredulous. “Do you know how long it took for it to just stop itching?”
Arkadiy shook his head, more to clear his thoughts than in response to the man’s words. Since no additional comment appeared forthcoming, he could only guess that the gesture had been taken as it was meant. “Okay. So explain the eye.”
“The purple? That’s easy.” He didn’t need to look to know that the half blind stranger was shrugging; he had an expressive voice. “Genetic modification somewhere in the family tree. Sure as hell wasn’t me or my parents, but it could be anyone beyond that.” He sighed. “You’d think they’d be more careful, leaving markers a mile wide in your code. Still, some people in the civilised worlds seem to think it’s cool.”
Arkadiy sighed heavily, letting his eyes fall closed for a second and wondering if either Vanya or the stranger would notice if he just fell asleep. Losing a leg and an argument took it out of a man. “So you’re not Havoc.” It was a redundant comment, but he had to try to cement it in his head. There was just so many similarities, it hurt to even look at the stranger.
“I’ve never even heard of him,” the man confirmed. Arkadiy heard the rustle of cloth as the man stood, and caught the hint of a softly spoken conversation between him and Doctor Lebedeva. Once they had finished, the man spoke again and it took Arkadiy a few second to realise he was being addressed. “But we do need to talk, about this Havoc guy and the android. It can wait, but not for long.”
“That’s fine,” he murmured, opening his eyes again and staring up at the ceiling in the way he had before, when five or ten minutes before life hadn’t seemed quite as complicated. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“I think it’s going to have to wait on when you’re ready,” the man said softly.
“And I will be the judge of that.” There was steel in Vanya’s voice, and Arkadiy hoped for the stranger’s sake, despite everything, that the man knew better than to argue back when faced with a voice that promised pain should the words go unheeded.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Arkadiy had to wonder if he had already had a run in with the tiny, sadistic woman to sound so suddenly meek, or whether he had just known another woman of similar temperament in the past. Either was likely, but the former struck him as more amusing and he couldn’t suppress the smile.
“I am glad to see you find this all so amusing, Captain Olenov.”
The smile vanished from his face. “No ma’am.”
“Good soldier.”
Unable to find anything to retort with, Arkadiy could do nothing but listen to two sets of footsteps retreat down the ward, and hear the door squeak open and slam closed in a punctuation of their exit.