A/N
From the PoV of a child in Battle School.
Can you feel the death on us?
What am I? A question usually quite easily answered. But not with me. I am not a child. None of us are. We may be young in years, but we don't talk like children, we don't act like children, we aren't treated like children. We are treated with respect usually given to Napoleon, to Lee, to all the great generals. But we are but the age of children, yet children we are not. Children can make mistakes. Children can be silly, can be frivolous. Children are not to be trusted with the fate of the world. Children are to be protected. But not us, for we are not children, nor are we adults. What are we, really? We were created, not by ourselves, by others. To run the world, to fight. To fight each other, we were created. Build, manufactured, trained, educated, we were made.
None of you know the feeling, do you? To know that you are not what you made yourself to be? To know that, no matter what, you do not belong to yourself. You belong to those who created you, like a machine. You belong to those who use you, like a machine. That's all we are. Little machines in the shape of children made to kill, to never slow down, and to never fail. For we are little machines made by the adults who want to use us. Our countries don't see us as little boys and girls anymore. Our countries see us as little girl and boy shaped robots sent to lead them into victory, so that they can run the world. We may seem to be in control, but we only do what we were programmed to do. We kill. We fight, kill, order killings; we do malicious un-childlike things that would never have been expected from the form we take. But we won't be children forever, what then? Will we reap the world with war then as now? Will we be the same little manufactured war machines? And we were all made quite the same. We. I use the pronoun, for there is no I in this statement. We could have been children together, if they had let us. Instead we fought. We fight. We will fight. Admire my conjugation, will you? They taught me. I did not speak like this in my short years before coming. In my six years of childhood I still did not act as a child, yet I didn't act like the monstrous killing machine we are now. I before, we now. I was as I was, as I never will be again. We are what we are, and we will be forever more. A manufactured army with the intelligence to win, and to kill. Any idiot can kill, but us, us the geniuses, the brilliance of us, we know we kill. And we despise it. But we were meant to do it. And we cannot stop. The killing is in our blood, the killing is imprinted on our skin, and we are branded with killing.
Can you feel the death on us?