Wine at the World's End

"Wine? How the hell did you get wine?"

"You have to ask?"

"I'd be neglectful of my duties if I didn't."

"Because as we both know, the duty of a GDI general is to investigate all possible contraband."

Wesley Riggs paused for a moment before taking a seat. He nodded, and General Michael McNeil poured them each a glass. He didn't know the make, and as the label was written in Italian, he couldn't read it either. Not many people could. As the world had died, as nations had died, languages and cultures had died with them. English was now the lingua franca of a planet ravaged by tiberium. He took a sip.

"Jesus, this is good." He took a sip, then another one. He looked at McNeil, who was slowly taking sips from his own glass. "Seriously Mac, how'd you get this?"

"Friend of a friend of a friend," McNeil said. "Well, more like acquaintances. Or, rather, people I'm obliged to work with."

"So which category do I come under?"

"The general who's visiting Threshold Base in the vain hope of assuring the men that there's a world outside R1, as well as offering congratulations to them." Mac leant back in his chair. "Fun fact Wes, this wine was bottled in 1995. In Italy."

Wesley didn't spit out his wine – it was too good and too precious for such a display. But he was nonetheless tempted to go through the motion, before saying, "Ninety five?"

"Yep. Don't know whether it was before or after tiberium was discovered for the first time, but yeah, that's when it was bottled."

"And now we're drinking it nearly seventy years later."

McNeil swilled his glass, and Wesley looked at him. He was old, Mac. They both were. Old enough to have fought in both the Second and Third Tiberium Wars, and in Mac's case, hold the line against the scrin in '58. Yet neither of them were so old as to remember the world as it was before the arrival of tiberium. Few people on the planet were. He could only imagine what Italy would have been like before the land itself was transformed into an alien wasteland, now designated Red Zone 1, as if 99% of the planet wasn't a red zone making such designations redundant. He could sit here in McNeil's quarters in the Moebius Research Station and look at a holographic panorama of the Threshold Tower, and the ruins of civilization around it – at least what few jutted out from the barren landscape and the tiberium glaciers. GDI had won every battle, but had still lost the war.

So here they were. Drinking wine, in the last days of the world. He cradled the glass in his hands, as he watched Mac sit his down on the table.

"Very good," he said. He sighed, leaning back in his chair. "Wines improve with age. The older I get, the more I like them."

Wesley smirked. "I didn't think you were a connoisseur."

"I'm not. The quote just sounded good."

"Right." Wesley finished his own wine, and leant back in his own seat as well. No-one grew wine anymore – not as tiberium swallowed more and more of Earth's arable land over the decades, and as diminished as the human population was, supply barely exceeded demand. Back in the 2020s, rice was in short supply due to the volume of water needed to grow it. In the 2040s, coffee and tea were being rationed. In the 2050s, he'd had to say goodbye to meat entirely. Now, in the year of an absent lord, 2061, what little food GDI could grow came from greenhouses in the few enclaves of human civilization that remained. A few hardy farmers tried to grow corn in the less severe areas, but they, like everyone on this planet, was fighting a losing battle. Prior to 1995, humanity had done a good job of screwing up the world. Since 1995, the world, through tiberium, had screwed them.

"Was it worth it Mac?" Wesley asked. "All those battles we fought in the last two wars? Nod, the Forgotten, the scrin?"

"We won," Mac said. He poured himself another glass. "I like to win."

"Yeah, and…? We fought Nod twice, we fought aliens twice. Heck, you even killed Kane, and that bastard came back."

"And died again," Mac said. He drained half of his glass. "I can die happy knowing that."

Wesley remained silent. He had doubts as to whether Kane had really died in TW3, and as for himself, he didn't know if he could die happy. He'd have preferred not to die at all. He was a soldier, and the possibility of death was part of the job, but a possibility of death was preferable to a near certainty of death. Death that would come either through starvation or suffocation.

Mac finished his glass. He poured himself a third one. "Here's to victory," he said, holding it up.

"You're drunk."

"Maybe." He took a sip, and put it down. Wesley could see the black lines under his eyes, which in turn were under thin white hair. Mac was old. Old enough that few would have recognised him as GDI's golden boy, a literal hero who'd saved the world from Kane's missile in '29. But then, even in the year 2029, who could have recognised the world as it was now? Even he could barely do so.

So he in turn drank the wine. Drank the juice of an extinct fruit, harvested from a destroyed country, that was located on a destroyed planet. Drink, and wait for the end, however long or short that wait may be.

Good thing the bottle was big, he reflected

A/N

Little challenge I set myself, to write a story with the phrase "wines improve with age. The older I get, the more I like them." That's admittedly not much of a challenge, but anyway, came up with this.