Destiny is quite a fickle thing isn't it?
I always thought that I'd grow old, have children and raise them with the values and beliefs of my family, as my father did, and his father before him.
I'd probably marry some backwoods girl, treat her like a princess only for her to leave me for some guy who makes more in a week than my father did working forty years in a factory his whole life. She'd leave me with the kids and I'd hurt for awhile, but I'd be okay, I'd bounce back, I always do.
Then I'd probably die in a car wreck, or get drafted, or heart disease would end me like it has most of my family. My children would cry at my funeral, and tell me how much they'll miss me, and how I was a great father despite the fact their only inheritance is a dirty three bedroom house that's falling apart and a rifle that was old when I was born.
But it'll be okay, I'll be keeping an eye on them from on high, watching over them and imparting my guidance and wisdom anyway I can. They would grow up to be successful, and to pick up where I failed, eventually having children of their own that they'll leave behind one day.
Then I can slap them on the back and tell them how proud I was of them, and how happy they made me and how happy they would be in paradise. Then we'd walk off, my face split by the biggest smile I've ever held as I introduced him to his grandfather, and may grandfather and every ancestor before us.
I'd call him my son, and he'd call me dad, just like I did with my dad, and he with his son. We'd all be happy and smiling.
Yeah, it was rough, and needed some fine tuning and probably wouldn't survive the future, but it was a plan, and it was mine.
So where did it all go wrong?
There was no backwoods country wife to keep me company in my youth, only mud. There was no broken down house, just a fox hole with some rotten planks in the bottom. There were no sons or daughters, only the dead strewn about the field between the trenches. There is no funeral with weeping loved ones, only the piercing cries of crows waiting for a break in the fire to swoop down and feast.
Where did it all go wrong?
My plan, my future, my vision. It all got flushed down the toilet the day someone pressed the big red button, and plunged the world into radioactive hell. Everything was gone, my friends, my family, even the trailer house my father worked his whole life to pay for and raised four kids in was swept away by the angry hand of a man who had no other reason than vengeance against an Emperor I would never lay eyes on. I didn't want to chase some chaos warlord across the stars, I just wanted to help rebuild my home.
But what did it matter? I was just some moron with a bolt action and a machete from the middle of nowhere, I was little more than a number on some politicians paper, counted up as some kind of tragic casualty. My death would be more useful than my entire life combined.
Damn it, I was just sixteen.
Not that my life was going to last all that long anyway, the round from some lucky kid who was barely old enough to write his own story had gone and gut shot me and ended mine. I always thought that I was some kind of hero, that I was ten feet tall and bulletproof, that me and mine were incapable of dying at enemy hands.
Troy and I had laughed about that the whole day before, even under fire. We brushed off every close call as a fluke and treated wounds with a pointlessness that just made us laugh more.
Troy doesn't laugh anymore, too busy listening to the wind whistle through the hole in his forehead to try. It was so sudden when he died, one second we were laughing and making a ruckus, and the next thing I hear is his neck breaking when his head snapped back from some cultists rifle.
It was stupid, now that I think about it. Here we were, a trillion miles away from home on some planet with no name serving as frontline troops for some planetary governor we'd never even heard of. What hope did we have of ever seeing home again?
"Life is the Emperor's currency, spend it well." The motivational posters would say, showing some bright faced youth in fancy armor with a gun most people back home would give their legs for. I lived a good life, I only hope that the Emperor bought something real nice with mine, and didn't spend it on a pack of iho sticks.
"Join the Imperial Guard!" The commercials on the radio would say. "Bring glory to the Imperium!"Well I did, and so far the only glory I had seen was when a squad of space marines lumbered across the trenches and up into the mountains, not even caring if they stepped on a corpse or if some stupid drug addled cultist managed to bounce a shot off their armor.
Didn't even stop to look when that shot blew my guts out.
Somehow I don't think they would have helped even if they had noticed.
I managed to prop myself up into a sitting position after awhile, and finally got a good glimpse over the rim of this pitiful mud pit.
There was no one else, no one in the fox hole's beside me, or in the ones beside them. They had either retreated or died, or retreated and died.
I was the only one holding the line, the only one in opposition to the enemy.
There was a great warcry from the enemy trenches, they had probably figured it out the same time I did.
I hauled my rifle out of the mud, clearing some of the dirt and blood from it and took aim at the horde of bodies that screamed and bayed for blood and battle.
My first round drops a fat man with symbols branded into his stomach to the ground, his hand grasping at the hole in his chest even as those closest to him descend on him with clubs and boards.
The second slams some spindly woman off of her feet.
The third pings through a helmet, the man wearing it crumpling to the ground in heap.
The fourth shot blows an arm off.
The fifth takes a leg.
The rifle that I've held from the time I was a child feels heavier than I remembered, and it sways dramatically in my hands. It doesn't matter though, it only held five rounds and I was completely out of ammunition. Not to mention the cultist hordes were just about on top of me anyway.
I grabbed my machete, grasping it in a shaking hand that felt heavier than anything I had ever felt. I manage to stand, or rather I prop myself up with my rifle, my machete held high in defiance of the hand that fate had dealt me.
I manage to swing it into the face of a screaming thing, maws opening up in its skin as it fell away with a screech. The return swing buries the blade in the ribs of another.
It's a desperate last act of defiance that ultimately amounts to a couple of dead, but not much else. The hordes hands reaching for me with crude hammers and axes, bundling themselves up in my jacket and hair, trying to pull me put of the hole to be butchered on the field.
It's the end and I know it, but I still hope that somehow, miraculously, impossibly, that I'll survive and be able to return home, and fill out a plan that would probably never come to fruition.
After all, I am a man with a plan, just no idea what it is anymore.
A/N:Yeet, a one-shot in the 40k universe, from the perspective of some kid in a bad place.