“I want a name,” Bosh said, slouching himself to one of the kitchen chairs. “Firmament’s got a name, I want a name.”
They had been stuck inside for three days.
Firmament lifted his head from the now-warm spot on the table top where he’d been trying to get his ear to stick like a suction cup until boredom had overtaken him and he’d stopped moving. Found a cold spot. Put his head back down.
“You’ve got a name,” Decon said, once it became clear Fir wasn’t intending to reply.
“Nah, man, like a code name,” Bosh snapped.
“Got a code name,” Decon said around a mouthful of wonderbread. He was the only one who would eat it (Firmament – the only other one who might – turned out to have a weird aversion he refused to explain), and he was the only one who asked for it to get bought, so he was the one responsible for eating the loaf before it got moldy. So he was standing at the pantry, eating it by the fistful from the bag.
“I hate you,” Julie said, contemplatively, from the couch in the other room.
Decon grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her.
“Quit flirting,” Bosh mumbled. Thankfully, Julie didn’t hear, so there wasn’t going to be any screaming and threatening and visits from security yet today, but the condemnatory look on Decon’s face and the wonderbread falling out of his open mouth were enough to make Bosh look away – a little bit apologetic, a little bit grossed out.
“Don’t you at least want… milk?” Seth guessed, peering around the edge of her newspaper. Decon froze, then grinned and nodded, pointing to her in recognition of her genius as he started to assemble his accompaniment.
“Auuggghhhh,” Bosh cried, thumping fists on the table. “Come on – a name. Why can’t I have a name?”
“Law,” Seth said, which in her arsenal of shorthand stood for the argument that anything that so much as suggested they were in violation of any of the numerous Islander Acts would be strictly prohibited. That they were in violation of said Acts did not diminish her point.
“But come on,” Bosh said, three words covering two minutes of sound. “It’s just a name – you can’t do anything cool with a name.”
“You can’t do anything cool anyway,” Fir said, then laughed at his own joke.
Seth burned him down with her eyes – which he couldn’t see through the back of his head – and went back to her paper. She frowned on comparative abilities-talk.
“Got a name,” Decon said, though that was difficult to translate. He managed, with feet and elbows, to get one of the kitchen chairs turned around backwards and plopped himself down between Bosh and Seth. He had a butter knife in his mouth, along with a mass of wonderbread, and as indicated by the jar he set down (along with other knives, a paper towel, and the half-eaten loaf) peanut butter. He offered the knives. Everyone refused (Seth didn’t participate).
“Don’t—” Bosh said, as Decon took the knife from his mouth and plunged it into the jar.
Decon froze again. “There’s another one.”
“Oh, God, CPS, you’re an animal.”
“What the fuck did he do to the peanut butter?” Julie asked from the couch.
“You’re not even looking!” Bosh cried. “How can you—?”
“I can smell it,” she snapped, getting ready to vault the back of the couch.
“There’s another one!” Decon called back.
“Wait, is it that cheap shit you eat?”
Decon looked down, confused that he had to check. “Yes?”
Julie sighed her way back down to the couch and ignoring them.
“There’s another kind?” Decon asked.
“She hides it,” Seth said.
“It has to be refrigerated, you fucking oafs.”
“Not at the back of the vegetable drawer,” Seth hissed at her newspaper, and thankfully nobody heard.
“Huh. Well, we got two of these,” Decon said.
“One now,” Bosh grumbled.
“I got two.”
“Jesus, I think I hate you, too, Decon.”
“Don’t talk shit,” Julie called from the couch.
Bosh opened his mouth to shout back, but Seth flicked down the edge of her paper to glare at him, and instead he rounded on Decon again. “I don’t have a code name.”
“I like your code name,” Decon said.
“It’s a nickname, not a code name,” Bosh said.
“Nah,” Decon took out another scoop of peanut butter, “it doesn’t make any sense as a nickname. You don’t get ‘Bosh’ from ‘Bosworth.’” He scooped the glob off the knife with two slices of wonderbread held like a dishtowel. “And we’re the only ones who call you that.”
He balled up the whole thing and shoved it in his mouth before Bosh could respond; disgust overtook whatever Bosh had meant to say in reply.
“Animal,” Bosh said.
Firmament’s head popped up, with an actual pop, kind of. He rubbed his ear. “Wanna know how I got my code name?”
After everyone was done flinching, Bosh nodded. “Yeah! Yeah, definitely. Story time with the crazy old timer. Tell us how it was back in the day!”
Seth was glaring at him over the top of her paper. Bosh shrugged defensively. “He offered.”
“The dudes,” Fir was finally adapting to this word in casual usages, but it still made him smile every time he said it, “in charge wanted us to work together, as a team, you know, but this was difficult – commies and rebels and Americans and all that, you know – if I didn’t murder one of the reds, then one of the bloc kids was going to do it – hell, they were fuckin’ way more likely to do it, actually—”
“Wait, block like New Kids on the Block?” Bosh asked.
“Soviet bloc,” Seth said, the ‘idiot’ part dropping off at the last second. “Kids from countries aligned with the Soviet Union.”
“Are you trying to tell me those nice boys were communists?”
She sank back behind her paper, glaring.
“I’m just saying it was a great opportunity for a joke.” Bosh leaned back in his chair. “You read that section like eight times today, you’re not fooling anybody.”
The paper crashed down. Then it burned to black ash. Seth brought her foot up on the edge of her chair, rested her elbow on her knee and turned to Fir. “Please continue.”
The peanut-butter-and-wonderbread covered knife made a little ‘plop’ noise as Decon pulled it out of his mouth. He shrugged at everyone apologetically.
Like a dormant Furby, Firmament just started right back up where he left off. “Sort of crazy nobody did, you know, thinking about it now. Anywho, of course, with all that bad blood you couldn’t have Vladimir Vladimirovich calling on Jan Kowalski, it would just remind everybody and things would get all tense, and we weren’t yet at the stage where we were all ‘peace and love and brotherhood’ with your brother from another commie mother, yet. Gotta have something to call someone, though.”
After a significant, frozen, pause, Bosh said, “And?”
“I wish I had a coffee,” Fir said. “I need to fill the pauses.”
“You lost coffee privileges,” Seth said.
“What? Still?”
“We have one mug left. You exacerbated Julie’s mug-hoarding problem—” “Fuck off!” “—and you broke the television.”
“It was technically practicing my abilities.”
“Practice happens in the gym, and that was also Day One.”
At this, Firmament actually looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t think we would be stuck here that long. Or that we had a budget for that kind of thing. One with limits, I guess. Thanks.”
While they had been discussing, Decon had gotten up and gotten Fir one of their carbonated waters from the fridge. He had also gotten himself one, and a bag of marshmallows from the pantry before he sat down.
“If we’re stuck here much longer you’re going to get fat,” Fir said.
Decon shrugged, spearing marshmallows on the knife.
Readying himself to continue Fir sipped his drink and made a face. “This doesn’t even taste like anything. Why can’t we just have cokes?”
“You’ll get fat,” Seth said. “Now entertain us.”
“So,” Fir said, “the big wigs all got together and decided we needed to find a way to smooth over the daily sort of ‘my dad shot your dad and then tortured the rest of you family to death’ tensions we had going on. But we didn’t all have cool names like Bosworth—” “Fuck off!” “—to shorten, and there were more than a few of us that had already had some renaming done to throw off the KGB, so to normalize all that they come up with the idea of giving us codenames.
“But you can’t just pick codenames for yourselves, like you can’t really pick your own nickname unless you’re a super cool kid named Bosworth—” “Dude, fuck you.” “—they need to be picked, in a way. Letting people pick their own code names is how you get eight squads called ‘The Dirty Dozen’ even though there’s only five guys on each squad. Plus, you don’t know if John Q. Kraut is going to pick something in kraut-landish that means ‘fuck your mother’ or ‘kill the commies’ or something.”
“I think that’s a slur, Fir,” Seth said. “Can I get a ruling? And Julie?”
“Yep,” Julie called out. Decon shrugged but nodded, using the knife of marshmallows to scoop out more peanut butter. Bosh, as usual, shook his head ‘no.’
“Yeah, gonna have to lose ‘kraut.’”
“Shit,” Fir said. “Okay. Well, as an American of the times, let me say that me and my fellow Americans would almost certainly have chosen something that meant ‘fuck your mother’ in whatever language if we thought we could get away with it, but since these were our guys – dudes – making the call, we couldn’t. Anyway, they weren’t so fucking stupid as to let us. But they can’t just assign shit – nobody will use it, everybody will get mad, somebody will get named ‘fuck your mother’ and they’ll have to explain it to Congress at some point – so they come up with as neutral an idea as they can.”
He took a long sip of his beverage. Decon had finally made a monstrosity clamped between slices of wonderbread that was too big for his mouth and was taking bites like a normal person. Bosh was watching in fascination. Seth tapped a finger on her knee.
“The Bible.”
“That’s super not neutral,” Seth said.
“What?” Bosh said.
“It’s a book,” Fir said, “that some religions—”
“Dude, you’ve seen my bar mitzvah photos.”
But Decon was nodding. “’And God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters…’ I always thought it was funny that it said ‘divide the waters from the waters.’ —Oh, wait, there’s a better one, right before the ‘and God made great whales’ part – the ‘firmament of heaven’ thingie, where’s he’s making birds and stuff.”
“Yep,” Fir said, leaning back in his chair. “Good ol’ King James.”
“So, wait, how comes they didn’t just give you normal names?” Bosh asked. “There’s like… a billion in there that aren’t ‘John.’ How did you end up with ‘firmament’?”
Fir leaned over the table again. “Now, for this, they got three of the top dudes on the program. Flew one of ‘em in. From Europe. They all put on their dress uniforms – I mean, maybe for us, maybe just because you got a guy from Europe coming everyone’s got to put their hot shit uniforms on, I don’t know – but they were all full dress. They brought in one of those big puppies, like they got up front in church, I guess to give it a real feel of authority. They got us all gathered ‘round, and told us that this was serious, and that there weren’t going to be any shenanigans with this naming thing. Once you got your name, you got your name, no take backs, no bitching.”
“And?” Bosh asked.
“They opened that big bastard up, grabbed all the pages like this,” he pressed his palms together before him, “let ‘em fall open, then closed their eyes and stuck a finger down and boom – you’re named.”
Silence reigned. Even Julie was listening from the couch, having stopped trying to put the television back together for a moment.
“What? No – no way!” Bosh said.
Fir nodded. “How do you think she got the name ‘Lamb’?”
Bosh froze, working it over, then shook his head. “No. Nah. Really?”
Fir only nodded, taking a sip of his drink.
“Dude, it’s amazing you ended up with a dope name. Like, do you know the statistical likelihood you could’ve been stuck with ‘begat’? Holy shit.”
“Yeah, so tell me where Logi is in the Bible, Fir?” Julie shouted. “And Magnus?”
“Fuck,” Fir said softly.
“What?!” Bosh cried.
“Dude,” Seth sighed, leaning back in her chair with her hand over her eyes, “you spend all that time begging Fir to tell you all those gnarly-ass stories and you don’t even know the codenames of all of his teammates?”
“’The heavens declare the glory of God,’” Decon said, smiling as he made a complex wrap of his ingredients with the strangely durable wonderbread crust, “‘and the firmament showeth his handiwork.’”
“Not cool, not cool at all, man, not cool, I was totally going to believe you.”
“Going to?” Julie drawled.
“Yeah,” Fir called loudly towards the couch, “but it’s all good. I think it’s a sign of your growing fondness that you won’t even let Bosh look like a fool for too long, Julie. I think you’re getting to like us.”
The sound of delicate things smashing as Julie stood up managed to reach them through Fir’s chuckling. Fists clenched, she glared at him, then turned on her heel, stomping towards the hallway, and inevitably, her lab.
“Shit,” Seth sighed, “Fir, now she’s never going to get the damn thing fixed.” She waved her hand in refusal of Decon’s shrugged offer. “No. It’s a point of pride, now. If you fix it behind her back she’ll probably freakin’… move out or something.”
“So that’s… bad?” Bosh asked.
“Shut up, Bosh. I want you to alert me if you feel anything weird coming off Julie, but stay out of her business.”
“Uh, contradictory input, on several levels; please clarify.”
She stood up, swiping the bag of marshmallows from in front of Decon. “Let’s see if they’ll let us visit Wes. I’ll bet he’s bored and we can test how he dodges with a cast.”
“Wes!” Bosh said, throwing back his chair as he stood. “That’s totally a codename.”
“You gonna fight him for it?” Seth asked.
Bosh sat back down.
“You, too,” she said, pointing at Fir. Her point followed his progress back down into his seat.
“What? Come on!”
“There is no way they’re letting you out of our floor, much less to visit Wes. We’ll pass along your regards.”
“That’s completely unfair,” Fir said, admittedly without much conviction.
“They still think him breaking his arm might have something to do with the street you threw at him. You know, the second street you’ve thrown. When they specifically instructed you not to throw any more streets after the first time you did it.”
Fir chuckled quietly to himself, then glanced at Seth and sighed. “It was only a bit of a street this time. Besides – they broke Wes’ arm.”
“Which you had no way of knowing at the time.” She said, eyes narrowed.
“Are mom and grandpa gonna fight? In front of the little ones?” Bosh exclaimed.
“That’s worse,” Decon said. “Worse than you calling them mom and dad. I vote against it.”
“Boo,” Bosh said, “why’d we have to get so democratic around here?”
“We voted for it,” Seth said. “Come on, Decon, let’s go. We’ll update you on how he’s doing when we get back.”
“I bet he has a working television,” Bosh said as he got up, then threw himself over the back of his chair at Fir, “and doesn’t live in lies.”
Fir didn’t flinch, and Bosh walked away, as did Seth and Decon. Despite Bosh’s feelings on the matter, the conversation hadn’t been wasted, at least for Seth. Fir had laughed, but looked away, glad she mentioned the street. The street was concerning, but not to Seth, who thought it was perfectly reasonable to chuck a bit of street at someone pointing an automatic weapon at your friends, especially when she was one of them. The look meant that Fir knew something about how Wes had broken his arm, which meant he knew something about what had happened between Wes having everything on his side of the fight under control, and Wes standing over the team’s first two fatalities in the field.