Hello!
This is going to be a dark MorMor fic, starting with their meeting and occasionally skipping around, perhaps. This is the prologue- short, I know, but the first chapter will be up by the end of the week. Consider this the teaser trailer, as it were.
Enjoy! :)
It was invasive, the sand. Filling every pore, every open space and orifice provided. Burns the eyes, stings the throat, fills the nostrils so nothing can be smelled but for the battle-worn golden sands of southern Iran, mottled with crimson.
The blood was never the worst part. The worst, was finding the dismembered body parts buried under layers of the sand, from detonated IEDs. Hands, feet. A head, one time.
At any given moment, at any campsite, your sleeping bag, your tent, your somehow still-breathing body could be mere feet above the long-dead parts of a corpse, preserved impeccably.
Oddly enough, that tended to bother most people, amongst other things. Shouts, and twitching, and quiet sobs could be heard in many encampments- symptoms of PTSD, lost friends.
The desert here was hell on Earth, and to the soldiers, their enemies the demons they'd been taught to fear since they were but children sitting on their father's laps as he read them myths and bedtime stories, the very stuff that makes up the nightmares of young children. A sort of blackmail, though adults would never admit it, to keep children in line.
Yet here, in this god-forsaken desert land filled with screams of both innocent and guilty alike, they seem a lot more real than fairytales.
The call came later than usual- a dismantled unit three kilometers north of their location had been decimated, and they were sent for clean-up duty. The grunt work.
Colonel Sebastian Moran had responded with a team immediately, their sand-worn Jeeps rumbling across the sand.
The smoke was visible from their camp, after all.
They pulled up, and the men jumped out immediately, checking pulses, securing the area. Supposedly, at the very least. That is, until a second grenade went off, blowing the small group out in all sorts of directions, yet more scarlet scarring the sand. Dead or unconscious, all of them.
Sebastian was one of the unlucky latter.
As always, reviews are greatly appreciated! :3