What Hurts the Most- Foreground
Saying Goodbye is the hardest thing you'll ever have to do,
The only thing in life that guaranteed is death. The whole circle of life B.S that they shove down your throat in ninth grade living environment. In the military death is to be expected, you physically prepare yourself every time you leave for the possibility of returning home in a wooden box. Sometimes it's not even the war that kills you, its after you come home. The PTSD, the flashbacks and mostly the anger. It all mounts up and somehow you feel backed into a corner. You don't want to look weak by asking for help, so instead you cling tight to your service piece. The memories of torn bodies parts of fallen brothers and sister rips through your mind like a child tearing through Christmas wrap. You remember miscellaneous things from your childhood but the one thing that sticks out to you is that over hand knot you learned in Cub Scouts. You remember how under significant pressure it just snapped.
Emma didn't flinch when the shots rang out, she had been to several of these funerals already as she mentally counted down the shots in her head. One. Two. Three. It was the typical three volley salute, in honor of Johnathan Swan. She scoffed wetly at the though of him being buried with the honor of the salute to begin with. He took his own life and tried to drag her down with him. He left her alone because he couldn't succeed with killing her in an attempted murder-suicide. He flinched, that's what they told her. The dull throbbing at the left side of her temple was a testament to that. The bandaged itched like hell but she was determined to ignore it.
She was angry at her father for being weak but she was even more angry at the people sitting here right now that did nothing to help the man they 'loved and respected'. She blamed them solely for her father's death and nothing nobody could say would ever change that. In four hours she was expected to hop on a plane from Minnesota to head to New York City to go live with a family she hadn't seen in over fourteen years. They expected her to just leave the place she just put her father to rest and she had to because a woman named Ingrid Midas was now her legal guardian.
AN: This is a re-write of a previous story of mine called Thief.