Archeologists aren't usually found on the battlefield. Even now, he'd never say he's been to war. But those around him know better, see the weight of a soldier in his step; look, there, at the set of his shoulders—this man knows how to fight. Gentleness is no deficiency, not when it is accompanied by unrelenting principle. The danger of his virtue glints in his eye like sunlight off the blade of a knife.

Unshakeable for all the world has worn him down. Like anyone who has stared death in the eye without fear, he is weary, and the tiredness clings like old dust to the seams of his sweater. How minutely the pain eats away at crisp edges. Such roughness is jarring, slight and at odds with a finely polished exterior.

That fragile trauma of the aftermath. He is so strong when the world is ending. Hard lines of his posture taut, determined; it is all the adrenaline of a sword drawn, a bullet fired, a question posed. See him now haunted at moments in passing. One step out of sync. Sameness does not become him, but how inscrutable the soldier, how much sorrow in the discrepancy between truth and expression. The magnitude of his life is apparent. The magnitude of his life is unknowable.

Death, how do you love a man so much, that you prefer the chase to the catching? There is some cruelty in it.

Mortal remains and a mortal remains. Perhaps God abused him to make a point to the Devil. Observe: Man may be beaten up and kicked down and pummeled into the dirt. Man may look down at his hands and see blood there for eighteen years though his innocence rests. Man may witness time murder his lover twice, watch fate kill her with a delicate press of a thumb to the throat; still may he embrace goodness with his sorrow, still may he pursue love and justice ardently.

And still may he find it, in the small things, in the few people. In the young boy bright, brash and naive and hopeful enough to not yet fully comprehend the war. In the light which coaxes the remnants of that same optimism even the broken and the bitter. In memory of love though it be lost.

May he find it, too, in the consistency of a good brew and the steadiness of rain in April. He deserves it. The strength in him is clear and loud and sweet: He has fought well, and loved better.