Folie a Deux

{|style="width:100%; color:#FFF;"
|valign="top" style="padding:5px;"|
 
----
“You know plasma can’t have names on it,” Morgan said to him, chomping on her Plucky Fruits candy charm bag. The crunching noise filled the small corner of the firebase, chasing away any hope of silence under the crawlspace.
Andrew looked up from his work station—a hastily overturned packing crate meant to carry grenades—and put down the scope he’d liberated from an MA37 in lieu of a magnifying glass.
“Excuse me?” he cocked an eyebrow at his squadmate, perched as she was atop a trio of water barrels pressed up against the side of the barracks wall.
“Plasma,” she motioned to the cell he held on top of the crate. “It can’t be engraved. I know what you’re doin’,” she cracked a smirk, raising her hands and shuffling them from side to side. “Every bullet has a name on it, kinda thing, right? Well, you gotta know that plasma doesn’t work like that.”
He pointed a pair of pliers at her. “And you know that candy’ll rot your teeth, but you still eat it.” He snapped the pliers shut for good measure. “They’re sucking candy, you know. I don’t even know how your teeth can get through ‘em,” dropping his voice, he turned his attention back to the glowing blue cell. “They could stop a damn fifty.”
She rustled the bag, pouring out three more of the crunchy, hard-boiled candy pieces into her palm. “I eat it out of spite,” she said, popping the pieces between her teeth and crunching on them. “Everyone says they’re unlucky, so they leave the bags in their MREs. More sugar for me, right?”
She grinned at him, flashing him her pearly whites.
Andrew rolled his eyes and bent back over the plasma cell on the crate, working at the edges of the housing unit with his pliers. He put the scope back up to his eyes, the edge of the containment housing coming into focus, gripped by the metal prongs of the tool.
“One of these days you’re gonna get punished for spitting in the face of Lady Luck,” he said matter-of-factly. 
She scoffed at him. “Like you’re any better!” she reached into her breast pocket, pulling out a second bag of the sweet treats and hurling it at him. They bounced off his pale brown hair and planted on the crate with a thud. 
“Working with a plasma cell. Those things are dangerous, you know.”
“I don’t exactly have a choice,” he picked up the bag of candy. A smiling bird on the packaging grinned at him, showing a line of teeth. Andrew was reminded of a study which once said people are attracted to the products that remind them of themselves. He put the packet in the breast pocket of his work uniform. 
“Jackals don’t use bullets,” he said, “so I can’t exactly make a proper HOG’s tooth.”
Morgan hummed, crunching down on another sugary sweet. “Ordnance Commission’ll string you up by your sack if they catch wind of you keeping contraband.”
“Well, if I drain the plasma it won’t be contraband, will it? It’ll just be junk,” Andrew smiled at her, tapping his head with the pliers. 
“Yeah right.” Morgan pushed herself off the barrels, screwing the bag up and stuffing it into the pockets of her trousers, dusting off her hands. “And you’re gonna drain the plasma using a pair of pliers and a rifle scope.”
“Well how bad could it be, huh?” Andrew asked. He pointed to the thing, no bigger than his palm. “It’s a small cell. Probably only has a couple shots left in it, I took it from a half-charged Beam Rifle, after all.”
She walked over to his crate, bracing her hands on either side and smiling. “When you singe your hair off, I’m gonna laugh.”
“Choke on your candy.” Rolling his eyes, Andrew went back to work, easing the end of the housing away from the containment material. Glass, or some kind of laminated material. He wasn’t an egghead. 
Morgan pushed herself off the crate, jostling him on purpose as she walked back towards her barrels, finger on her chin in thought. 
“Gonna call you…” she paused, humming. She snapped her fingers. “‘Airless Andrew. No,” she furrowed her brow. “Uh… Warrant Officer Waxed. Hmm. This is harder than I thought.”
Smiling to himself, Andrew closed his eye around the scope to pin it in place and reached a spare hand down to grab the rocking cell. “Your brain’s got too much plaque from all the sweets. I’m waiting for the day the stress and diet to pop a gasket in your head.”
She gasped, holding a hand to her chest in faux-shock. “And where would you be without me?”
“Relaxing on a beach on Saturn’s moons,” he muttered. 
“Aww,.” Both hands went over her heart, grabbing hold of each other in a saccharine manner. “So you only stick around for my sake? I’m flattered.”
Andrew wrenched the pliers away from the cell, slamming them on the crate, and bracing his hands on it. “No, I bloody well stick around because—”
He didn’t finish. The rocking of the plasma cell and the pull of his pliers ruptured the containment housing. The plasma spewed forth in a scorching torrent, whistling as it boiled the air around the crate and created a vacuum in an instant. Air rushed in to fill the empty space, came into contact with the expanding fireball, and blasted everything outwards.
Andrew was lifted from his feet, tossed through the air, and landed on a grass bank thirty feet away. Morgan was tossed back into her barrels, spared the brunt of the fireball only by their protective metal housing, and the cool water within.
The fireball cooled from rich white to deep cyan, then faded to smoke and nothingness. Debris and bits of metal packing crate began to rain down on the barracks, and Morgan coughed out the smoke from her lungs as she came to.
A hand went onto one of the barrels to help herself up, but she drew it back and stumbled when she felt how hot the metal was. She stood on shaky legs, her ringing ears stuffed with cotton.
She wrenched her jaw from side to side, batting at the dancing motes of light around her head. “Holy shit,” she said to herself. “Holy shit!”
Her eyes went over the scene. The crate and the fuel cell were both gone, reduced to a small crater about the size of a ‘Hog tire. Morgan stumbled towards it.
“Andrew!” she called, coughed out more smoke from her blackened lungs, and tried again. “Andrew! You alright?”
Her eyes peered through the haze and saw a prone figure on the grass. She ran over to him, stumbling as she went and landing hard on the gravel path beside him. “Andrew!”
He sucked in a breath, coughing in much the same way she was not seconds before. “God damn it!”
Morgan let out a sigh of relief, sitting back on her legs and hunching over him. “You okay?”
Andrew furrowed his brow, rubbing a sore spot on his chest. It felt like he’d been stuffed in a flash-fryer, the skin on his face red and burning, his bare arms fared little better. But he could see, and he could hear, and he was still alive.
“Yeah,” he said. His chest felt so sore. “Yeah I’m good.”
Morgan punched him square in the jaw. “You idiot!You absolute moron! I told you not to mess with those things!”
Andrew reeled from the punch, a fresh stinging sensation across his face. He rolled over onto his side, and something fell out of his tattered breast pocket. He focused his eyes on it, and saw a shredded candy packet, with a lopsided, shattered toothy grin on the front.
“Holy God,” he said.
The sweets were ruined, but that wasn’t what concerned the man. Embedded in nearly every single one of the sweets were tiny bits of shrapnel. Shrapnel from the plasma cell he’d been hunched over. The explosion had sent them all straight up, and would’ve shredded him apart, if the hard-boiled sweets weren’t there to stop them.
Morgan sat next to him, her face contorting into one of shock as she saw what Andrew could see. 
“What the…” she leaned over to look at the sweets.
Andrew could do nothing but chuckle. “Yeah, you got that right. I told you they could stop a fifty.”
Morgan picked one up, turning it over in her fingers. “You lucky sunnova…”
“Maybe there’s somethin’ about this Candy after all…” Andrew rolled over, slumping onto his back on the grass. 
“Better than fussing around with plasma cells,” Morgan said, before her face lit up. “Maybe that one did have your name in it.” She laughed.
Andrew looked at her, before he too started laughing. Rich, full-bodied guffaws that he couldn’t keep down. Morgan leaned into him, and they lay there on the grass for a time.
Eventually they came back down from whatever mania had sent them into their fit of laughter, and lapsed back into silence. 
Andrew cleared his throat, looking at Morgan with a sheepish grin.
“You uh…” he chewed on his tongue and grinned. “You wouldn’t happen to have any left, would ya?”
She scoffed. ““You know what?” reaching into her other trouser pocket, she tossed a packet at him. 
He picked it up and smiled at her.
She gave him a wink in return. “You need it more than me.”
----
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:SilverLastname