The war raged on and it was a thousand to one. He sat alone in this small tower, dark, and damp with all the blood of soldiers with nameless faces, and labelled uniforms. Branded. Marked. Judged. All just like him.
The sky looked soft, like the pillows on mother's bed but he was too far from that now to dare to pine for it. So he cast his gaze a little down, to see rage and anger and fear carved into the bodies of men. They charged at him with the fury of hell. He burned with helplessness at controlling his own instinct.
Bang.
The silence that always followed is as eerie as it was deafening and he is left alone, again, wondering: what am I doing? And in times when pockets of mute daydreams funnel sharply back to harsh reality, he sees all this red and flesh and bare bones and then thinks to himself: what have I done? What did killing all those men do? He didn't stop a war. Wars don't end when people die. Wars only end when there's no one else left for death to claim.
The hollow sockets of a skull smiled at him; taunted him to go as far as it had gone. It exposed his cowardice and it burned like fire in his soul.
He blinked in the face of the blinding sun and shut out its crimson glare. His hand moved according to will – to be cleansed. To be free. Still, fear overtook his heart even as his conviction strengthened. Shall he count? A final pathetic offering to the remains of his humanity. Deep breath.
Three.
Two.
One.
Dare he? (No-)
Click.
(00)
Tears came down like his eyes were bleeding them and he yearned to wail like he did when he was a baby. He wanted to yell and scream and cry out profanities with the wrath of the devil wronged but it was all too soundless.
Nothing moved but him, nothing made a noise but him. And in this still-life atmosphere he felt captured in a mould that bound his body to fetal position, and his mind to when he feared monsters under his bed. Alone. Afraid. Alive. Cowering in the dead of the quiet.
The raw suffocating gasps of his choked breathing echoed menacingly against the brick walls and they seemed to shake precariously with every spasm of his lungs. Muscles tense to the point of hurting, shivers hurting to the point of numbness. He quivered in the dark, unable to wipe the boring of the skull's black sockets from his mind's eye. Blood soaked his uniform to saturation as his splayed form morbidly mopped up the scarlet pool slithering across the dusty dirt floor. He allowed himself to be paralysed.
If they came now he wouldn't stop them. This tower – his tower was theirs to take. Come. Come and end his misery, come and kill him. What a simple thing to do, to kill. One pull of the trigger could end everything and yet, for the thousands of souls he had annihilated he wasn't spared just a single bullet to feed his cowardice. What should he do, then? What can he do now? Nothing else but wait. And wait. And wait.
And wait.
(Come. I beg you.)
But in the dark of the night where he drowned his vision in black, he couldn't help but feel, but know. No one would come. Not for a German. Not for a soldier. Not for a lonely man in a broken tower.
Not for him.
So suddenly he was a boy again: alone, cold, scared, and forgotten. He played with lost memories. He dreamt with toy skulls that aren't real are not real cannot be real and he cannot see not in this black, so he pretended. Imagined that his lids are closed and not pried open and swollen. That he saw stars in his dreams and not the shine of wet metal. That he was sleeping and all would be perfect when daylight strikes. He pretended, in the soul-sucking black, that he was innocent, and forgiven, and pardoned, and sane, and staring at nothing at all and at the hollow of empty eye sockets and he played, with the devil, and pretended that he was dead.
