A/N: DARN ALL THE FEELINGS.
I see her. And she sees me.
You had thought it was easy then—the killing. That fighting for right guarded you against it, shielded you, and if you ever feared for tomorrow's coming, it was only your tomorrow.
That is the worst of it. You aimed and fired, and fired again, and the enemy came from behind.
Penny and dime.
(Maybe in another life, you could admit that you loved her almost too much.)
You are not a man of memories, flaring to the surface of your mind in bursts of pain. You are a man of agony, and blood, and is it really memory when it never, ever leaves?
(God, but you loved her. She was perfect and pure and so, so small—never smaller than when you held her last).
You break, and you break, and you break, but it does not matter. Nothing matters, not blood or dust or desert sand, not heat or chill or pain. It is easy to break bones when nothing holds back your strength, easier to pull a trigger a hundred times, five hundred times.
(When you first held them in your hands, your clumsy hands, they were so small and fragile, and you feared that you might hurt them. But they were never afraid of you.)
(Please, she says, and you tell her no, you tell her tomorrow—)
Your hands never falter, never shake, but you break and you are broken and you have been broken since—
It is always the same as that moment. Never more or less, always all—all that it was then, when you held her in your arms, when the precious face you loved was gone, when all that ever held you back fled with it.
And you begged, and you begged, and you beg—but it is no use, no more pressure to the will of the world than the weight of finger on trigger.
(For tomorrow came—but it came without her.)