Hey! It's been a while since I've written anything, but I've been rewatching the series, and this oneshot came into my brain and just had to be written. It's a little on the short side, but its meant to be. In other news, I'm working on the next chapter of The dark Of Shadows, so that is a thing. Hope you enjoy, and tell me what you think!
"It's the mission before the man."
It was one of the first things Vert told each member about this multiverse spanning war on evil. It was the battle key that was the priority. If you went down, and they had not secured the key, you came second. And sometimes his mind got the best of him, and went down the path of thinking about what it truly means.
In general, it was a good rule. Don't focus on the person, focus on the goal. The greater good. But, there was one small problem, in the logic, one small problem Vert dwelled on every once in a while, for a period of time.
They were human.
And humans are made to be compassionate. Humans feel for one another. When one person dies, a small piece of everyone around them dies with them. On impulse, on an emotional level, on a part of them they can't control, if someone went down, they'd want to and would run back to them, even if there was nothing to run back too.
It was evident to Vert most of all, who spent every minute on the battlefield striving towards the perfect outcome; the earth is safe, and everyone comes out of that battlezone alive. But with wars, as much as it goes well for one side for a while, eventually, its going to fail. Someone is going to get killed and they are going to leave their blood on a battlezone, and he was going to have to live with it for the rest of his life. Even if it was uncontrollable, even if he could have done nothing to stop it, he would blame himself. There would be a lingering should have or could have. He knew that if someone died, he would not get a chance to grieve, He was going to have to keep moving, pick up the pieces of his team, and go forward, all the while leaving bits of himself in the dust.
It was unavoidable. And it was for that reason, he envied his enemies for one thing. The Sark had no emotions, if one was destroyed, there was another to take it's place, the Vandals had no compassion, it was conquer or be conquered. Krytus and his reds could simply regenerate and come back, they'd never lose one of their own permanently.
As much as Vert tried to convince himself that he and the others would follow that path if it came down to it, he knew that they all had at least one member, maybe more they would rush back for, no matter the consequences. That one person they couldn't trust themselves to live without. He was just the same. He could see their face pop up in his brain whenever his mind lead him down that dark path in the middle of the night when he can't get to sleep.
In general, being a human in a multiverse spanning war was as big as a disadvantage as you can get. So much was unknown to them, emotions get tangled up and affect performances, mistakes so easily made, and the frailty of the human life raising all the stakes.
But there were a few benefits to being human. There compassion for one another gave them a stubborn refusal to believe it was impossible to save their friends, solving the way out of any complex problem. There was always hope, even in the worst of times, there was always that glimmer of "Maybe things will get better."
There were problems with the idea of the mission first, but with those problems came the drive for perfection, to make no mistakes, to consistently win because you had something to lose.
And personally, his consolation was that his team would always be there for him. They would never let him down, the weight of a conscious too much. As the leader, Vert would always push himself to the limits, beyond the limits, for his team, for Sage, and for the Earth. With the determined hope, that if he had anything to say, after every fight everyone would be sitting around a table at Zeke's.