A little bit of a story which I’m reserving rights to. Starts now:

“Are there any side effects?” he had asked.
“None besides the obvious ones that come with such a relationship.”
“Why not experiment on a grunt–they don’t matter?” but you don’t say things like that. No one ever says things like that. Even now, at this last moment when anything that is said would allow the individual to be released from the program, free to go to whatever other aspect of military life–but that would be failure. Instead he said “For the Great Cause.”
“For the Great Cause.”

“Designation.” He still said it aloud. It was a matter of discipline. The Binding, as far as he understood, was so complete that he would never have to speak again. It had in fact of practice become unwritten protocol to suppress aural communication altogether to ensure maximum privacy in the Bind even if that went against the common sense of military dictates. To limit your roads of communication raises the chance of in-battle miscommunication.

Discipline is key.

You watch nothing: you see. You hear nothing: you listen. You touch nothing: you feel everything.

Assigning. A short pause. We dreamed again. It wasn’t a question. The Binding didn’t support a need for questions. The Binding was enacted to allow action without the need for ceaseless questions or doubt.

The Binding, unfortunately, didn’t support a need to share similar discipline. She would always communicate through the Bind, she had no mantra: she merely responded. She always responded. In that voice.

A voice that evoked a feeling of fabrics and the smell of cakes and the taste of tea with too much milk and vanilla. A voice that lightly touched the back of his mind, as if it were sleepy fingers reaching up from a pillow, touching his neck, welcoming the morning and enjoying his presence.

It had taken him years to hide things behind the Bind. But he could really only do it while awake.

“Yes.” his answers came quickly. He found it easier to hide behind spoken words and found it ironic that that was what he used to do all the time in another life.

We have no need to dream. I can disable it if you wish…

“But we enjoy it.”

Yes. He found himself wondering (and hiding) his oft-repeated thought: does she know how to hide things from the Bind? Early on, during the mandatory coma, she had crawled her way through his thoughts, prying places which he had long wanted left alone and locked away. Perusing dimly lit passages of his subconscious and leaving echoing footfalls in his thoughts which left him feeling like he didn’t have a secret to share or a burden to relieve.

Like a man who comes home to find it robbed.

But she was so perfect at it: trained to do it since birth. If she could hide things from the Bind what would she hide? Perhaps her laughter at the type of person I was or am? Snickering behind invisible hands at his likely vain attempts to hide his thoughts and consciousness like a wife who knows more about her husband than the man does.

But maybe she simply hid her own dreams of screaming through the night, unrestricted by a mortal as she reached for the impossible distances of the heavens? Pushing the restrictions of light and space and entering that part of dreams where the impossible skews tangible.

Designation assigned: Lost. Designation assigned: Saber.

“Lost1ne designation acknowledged.”

Be careful. Her thoughts softly, warmly stroked his mind. The touch of a nervous lover wanting to confirm the presence of her beloved before he leaves home. He hid behind the bind, stopping the shudder before she would notice it. He hoped her mental cringe was related to something other than maybe actually catching a bit of his thoughts.

“I will.”