Bravo 6, Going Dark

The inflatable Combat Rubber Raiding Craft cut black water off Coronado at 0300 and Maxwell "Max" Steele was trying not to puke. He was twenty-four, a farm kid from Nebraska who had joined the Navy because corn made him claustrophobic, and now he was Bravo 4 in SEAL Team Three's newest element. The surf was high, the January cold was a knife in his wetsuit, and the instructor screaming from the chase boat had told them this would be a simple insertion.

Nothing about becoming a SEAL was simple.

Next to him, trying to keep the boat from flipping, was the new transfer everyone called Lucky Strike. Lucius "Lucky Strike" Palmer. Bravo 6. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, dark hair cropped close, eyes that seemed too old for his face. He had come from Dev Group on paper but his record was redacted into a black hole. He never bragged. He never complained. He just worked.

"Keep your weight centered, Nebraska," Lucky said without looking at Max. His voice was low, with an accent Max could not place. Not southern. Not New York. Something older.

"I am centered," Max hissed through salt.

"You are praying," Lucky said.

The boat hit a breaker and launched. Max lost his grip and would have gone over if Lucky's hand had not clamped his forearm. The grip was absurdly strong. Cold. Steady.

"Got you."

They made the beach. They hauled the boat above the tide line and collapsed into the sand, chests heaving. Training day three of Hell Week's evil cousin, a joint exercise with Team Five. Instructors were giving them ten minutes.

Max stared at the sky. "You ever think about quitting?"

"No."

"Ever?"

Lucky lay back, rain ticking his face. "Every day for about two thousand years."

Max laughed. "Yeah. Feels like that."

Lucky did not laugh. He turned his head. "You are good, Bravo Four. You have heart. That is rarer than muscle."

Max felt his face get hot despite the cold. No one had said that to him since BUD/S started. The older guys usually just called him Cornfed and told him to carry more weight.

"Thanks, Bravo Six. You — you are the reason I did not drown back there. So thanks."

Lucky smiled then, a small, sad thing. "You can call me Lucius when we are not on the radio."

"Max."

"I know."

They were fast friends after that night. It was not normal in the Teams. Usually you earned trust over deployments, over blood. But something clicked. Max was all earnest questions and midwestern optimism; Lucius was quiet knowledge and strange calm. In the chow hall, Lucius would listen while Max talked about his sister back in Kearney, about wanting to buy land after the Navy, about his fear that he was not ruthless enough for this job.

"You think too much about being ruthless," Lucius said one afternoon, peeling an orange with a dive knife. The blade moved with surgical precision. "Ruthlessness is not a virtue. Decisiveness is. Compassion is harder."

"Compassion does not get you through a door kick."

"It does if you remember who you are protecting behind that door."

Max thought about that for weeks.

In the field, Lucius was uncanny. He never got lost. He could read terrain like a book written in his own language. He could tell when a storm was coming twelve hours before the weather guys. He spoke Arabic, Spanish, Pashto, and what Max swore was Latin when he thought no one listened. He never got sick. He never got a cold sore, never got food poisoning when the whole team did in Djibouti. He had a scar on his side, a puckered star of tissue low on his ribs that Max saw once in the locker room. It looked old. Really old.

"Shrapnel?" Max asked.

"Something like that," Lucius said, pulling his shirt down.

On weekends they went to a dive bar in Imperial Beach that did not check IDs too hard. Max drank cheap beer. Lucius drank water and watched the room. Once a drunk ex-Marine tried to start a fight with Max over a pool game. Lucius stood between them, did not raise his hands, just looked at the man, and the man backed away, pale, muttering about eyes.

"What did you do?" Max asked later.

"I remembered him being born," Lucius said, then caught himself. "I mean, I remembered being that drunk. It passes."

Max noticed other things over months. Lucius did not like churches. He would wait outside when the team went to a memorial service. He hated needles. He knew how to make fire without a lighter. He had a tattoo on his forearm, faded almost to nothing, that looked like SPQR but he claimed it was a drunken mistake in Naples. He wrote letters by hand, never email, in perfect cursive. He had no family photos. He had no social media. His apartment was empty except for books, many of them in languages Max could not read.

"He is weird, but he is good weird," Max told their platoon chief.

"He is the luckiest bastard I have ever seen," the chief said. "Call sign fits."

Their first real deployment together was Syria. A snatch and grab on a bomb maker. Simple on paper, messy in reality. They fast roped into a compound at midnight, Bravo element sweeping. Max was second man through a doorway and a kid, maybe fourteen, raised an AK with shaking hands.

Max froze.

It was a quarter second, but in CQB a quarter second is forever. Lucius moved past him like water, not shooting, just placing his hand on the barrel, pushing it down, speaking softly in Arabic. The kid collapsed, crying. Lucius zip tied him gently and moved on.

After, in the helo, Max could not stop shaking. "I froze, Lucky. I froze."

"You hesitated," Lucius corrected. "Hesitation is human. Freezing is deciding to do nothing. You decided to see a boy, not a weapon. That is not weakness."

"You would have shot."

"I have shot boys before," Lucius said quietly. "I regret every one."

Max stared. The helo noise swallowed everything else. For the first time he felt the weight in Lucius. Not arrogance. Grief.

That night in the barracks in Rota, Max brought two beers and sat across from him. The base was quiet. The air conditioning hummed. Outside, cicadas screamed in the Spanish heat.

"You said you shot boys before. When?" Max asked.

Lucius took the beer but did not drink. His hands were big, knuckled, the nails cut short. He looked at the bottle like he was trying to remember what beer was.

"I joined the legions when I was eighteen," he said.

Max laughed. "Roman reenactment?"

Lucius did not smile. "Legio X Fretensis. Under Tiberius. We were stationed in Judea. Hot. Miserable. Full of zealots who wanted to kill us and priests who wanted to kill each other. My commander was a bastard from Germania who hated the sun. We crucified rebels every Friday. It was routine. It was paperwork."

The room was too small suddenly. Max's heart hammered.

"Lucius, man, are you — are you okay? Like, do you need to talk to psych? I can call someone."

Lucius looked up, and his eyes in the cheap fluorescent light were wet and endless. "I know how it sounds. I would not tell you if I did not trust you. And if I did not think you would die on the next deployment without knowing why I never age."

Max's mouth went dry.

Lucius pulled up his shirt again, showing the scar. "This is not shrapnel. This is from a spear that slipped. I was on crucifixion duty. We did them every week. Bandits, rebels, this one was a preacher. They said he claimed to be a king. He was already dead when the centurion told me to make sure. I did not want to break his legs. So I took my hasta and thrust it into his side. Upwards. To the heart. That was procedure."

He stopped. His voice cracked.

Max whispered, "You were —"

"The one who opened his side. Yes."

Max could not breathe.

"Blood and water came out. It hit my face. My arms. My mouth was open. I tasted it. It was warm. The sky went black at midday. There was an earthquake. The temple veil story, that came later, but I felt the ground move. And I did not die. Not that day. Not ever again. My optio noticed I stopped aging. By the time Jerusalem fell in seventy, I looked twenty-five while my friends looked fifty. I left the legion. I tried to be a fisherman. I tried to be a father. My son died of fever while I stayed young. My wife thought I was a demon. She was probably right."

Max stood up, knocked his chair over.

"Nope. No. Nope. You are fucking with me. That is not funny, Lucius. That is blasphemy or some shit. That is stolen valor from the Bible."

"I know," Lucius said. "I thought it was a curse for a hundred years. Maybe it is. Maybe it is mercy. Jesus looked at me. He was dead, Max, but he looked at me. And I heard — not with ears — 'Until you see me return, you will remain.' Or something like it. My Greek was bad then. My Aramaic worse. But I felt it. Like a brand."

Max paced the small room, hands in his hair. "You are telling me you are the Wandering Jew? Longinus? The immortal Roman who stabbed Jesus and now has to walk the earth till Judgment Day?"

"Longinus is what the later monks called me. I never learned that name until four hundred years later in a scriptorium in Lindisfarne. They wrote about me like I was a legend. I was copying the same gospel that condemned me."

"This is insane."

"Yes," Lucius said simply. "I have had leprosy and lived. I have had plague and lived. I have been stabbed twenty three times, shot seven, drowned twice, burned. I have walked away from every battlefield since Jerusalem fell. I watched Rome burn under Nero and again under the Goths. I was a farmer in Gaul for sixty years. A monk in Ireland who broke his vows because I could not stop remembering women. A mercenary for the Doge. A printer's apprentice in Mainz who met Gutenberg. A stonecutter. I held a boy at Antietam while he died calling me father. His name was Thomas. I went over the top at the Somme and watched my entire company sink into mud. I landed at Omaha and did not die when every man around me did. I was in Hue. I was in Fallujah. I was in Ramadi. I am Bravo Six because I am good at war. I have had two thousand years of practice. And I am so tired of learning new rifles, Max. So tired of new flags."

Max sat down hard on the floor. His beer spilled, foaming across concrete.

"Why tell me? Why now?"

"Because you are my friend," Lucius said. "My only friend in this century. And because you asked if I ever think about quitting. I have tried. In eighteen ninety two I put a pistol in my mouth in a barn in Kansas. It misfired. In nineteen eighteen I tried to hang myself in a field hospital outside Chateau Thierry. The rope broke and the nurses laughed because they thought I was joking. In nineteen thirty four I walked into the desert in Arizona to die of thirst and woke up three days later with my skin healed and a coyote watching me, disappointed I was not food. God will not let me go until — until He comes back. And I am tired, Max. I am tired of watching everyone I love turn to dust while I stay the same. I am tired of being Lucky Strike when I have never been lucky."

Max stared at his friend. At Lucky Strike. At this man who had taught him to tie a tourniquet one handed, who made terrible coffee, who hummed a song in a language Max did not know while cleaning his rifle, who always knew the constellations even without a map, who cried once when they heard a choir singing on the radio.

"You believe me?" Lucius asked, voice small.

Max thought about the grip on the boat. The scar that never faded. The way dogs went quiet when Lucius walked by. The way old men in villages sometimes looked at him and crossed themselves without knowing why. The way Lucius never took communion when the chaplain came, just sat outside, hands folded, head down, as if he was not worthy to enter.

"I do not know what I believe," Max said honestly. "I was raised Methodist. We did not really do the spear guy. We did potlucks. But I believe you believe it. And I believe you are my friend. So if you are cursed, then you are cursed. If you are crazy, then you are my crazy. Either way, you saved my life twice. That counts more than theology."

Lucius closed his eyes. A tear tracked down his cheek and into his short beard. It caught the light.

"Thank you."

"So what happens now?" Max asked.

"Now we go on deployment and you watch my back and I watch yours. And we do not tell command I am two thousand years old. They have enough paperwork."

"And the Second Coming?"

"If it happens, you will know. I will be gone. Or finally allowed to die. I do not know which I want more. Rest. I want rest."

Max crawled forward and grabbed Lucius's hand. It was warm now. Human. Calloused. Scarred beyond counting if you looked close.

"Then I guess I hope He waits," Max said. "Because I need my Bravo Six. The new guys need you. I need you. So if you have to walk till the end of time, at least you do not walk alone for a bit."

Lucius laughed, a real laugh this time, rusty from disuse, like a gate opening after centuries.

"Maxwell Steele. Bravo Four. Cornfed philosopher."

"Lucius Sextus Valerius Pulcher. Bravo Six. Lucky Strike. Oldest motherfucker in the Teams."

They sat there until the spilled beer dried and the cicadas stopped and the base lights clicked off one by one.

Two weeks later they hit a compound in the mountains. The intel was bad. It was an ambush. The team had been sold by a local asset and they took fire from three sides, PKM and RPG and old Soviet mortars that whistled like teapots before they killed you.

Max took a round through the thigh and went down hard behind a low wall. He was screaming for his mother without meaning to, the way farm kids do when they forget how old they are. Blood pulsed hot into his pants, shock making his teeth chatter.

Lucius was there instantly. He dragged Max behind cover, his own blood mixing with Max's, because Lucius had taken two rounds to the chest and was still moving, still breathing, eyes furious and alive.

"You are hit," Max gasped.

"It will heal," Lucius said, gritting his teeth as he packed Max's wound with gauze from his own kit. His hands did not shake. They never shook. "It always heals."

"You cannot keep doing this forever," Max whispered, clutching Lucius's vest.

"I can until I am released," Lucius said. He pressed his forehead to Max's helmet. The gunfire hammered the wall, chipping stone, dust falling in their eyes. "Stay with me, Nebraska. Keep your weight centered."

Max laughed through blood and pain, tears cutting his dirty face.

"Praying," he said.

"Yes," Lucius said, and for the first time in two thousand years he prayed out loud with someone else, not in Latin, not in Greek, not in the formal prayers of a thousand liturgies he had memorized, but in English, in the voice of a SEAL from Nebraska who called him friend and who would die someday while he would not. "Pray."

In the hospital in Landstuhl, Max woke up to find Lucius sitting beside him, chest bandaged but already sitting upright, reading a battered copy of Marcus Aurelius in the original Greek. The nurses said it was a miracle Bravo Six survived those chest wounds. Lucius said nothing. He just put the book down and peeled an orange, same way as always, and handed Max a slice. Max understood then that his friend's curse was not just immortality. It was memory. Every friend, every war, every name remembered perfectly while the world forgot. Every child buried. Every city burned. That was the real spear wound, deeper than flesh, that never healed.

And so Max prayed while his immortal friend bled and did not die, holding pressure on his leg until the birds came screaming overhead, until the extract helo cut the night with its rotors and its red light and its screaming door gunner, until they both were lifted into the black air, two seals who met for the first time on a rubber boat off Coronado and became fast friends, one of whom carried a secret older than any church, older than any flag, waiting for the day he would finally be allowed to rest, and the other who had decided that if his friend had to walk the earth until the end of time, he would walk beside him for as long as he was given, step for step, Bravo Four and Bravo Six, into whatever came next, together.

He kept his promise. Max never told anyone. But sometimes at night on watch, he would hear Lucius whispering a name, Jesus, not as a curse, as a question, waiting for an answer that had not yet come. Together they waited, two friends against eternity. Always together.