Blue eyes meet colourless, colourless because all their eyes have blended into a singular nightmare; colourless because if you remembered who they were, you would remember that it's all your fault they're dead. You're next, you're next, you hear them scream, you're next, you're next, they mock! They mock you for still breathing while their orbs have turned to glass, while the last wisps of their lives have collapsed and dissolved with a sigh, they mock you for acting resolute yet being such a child- and the worst part is they're right, you see yourself in their eyes, battered, broken, stronger and taller yet nothing but the barest shadow of the boy you used to be, nothing but the barest whisper of an unattainable dream.
Your best friend says you worry too much, says that it's because you worry about yourself and your friends and their friends and the rest of the whole wide world that you're so serious all the time. Yet you know that you can't afford to fall back from being the protector, the one that shields him from the brutalities of what he's going through, the one that keeps that smile on his face when you tell him to go wash his face or that his hair is tangled. You're a mirror, mirror, a mirror that tells you what's wrong with yourself and wrong with the world, reflects not only light but darkness from hell, a mirror that can't escape from truth but can mask itself in lies. A mirror that reflects the foil to his laugh and the counterpart to his darkest demons, but most of all, a mirror of death and sadness and the numbness that you wish you never knew. Seven years bad luck for breaking you, you muse, or seven years of rest after you've been broken? You don't know, and sometimes, you wonder whether you wish to live long enough to know.
Sometimes you wonder whether your father once felt this way, whether he only met with peace when his eyes were sealed shut with the brutal piercing of a blade. Whether he looks down and sees that his son is still alive but dead, whether he sees that his son has trodden the path he wanted you to, the path strewn with blood and broken arrows and voices that swim in your head at night. The path with the fact that throbs when you're on the brink of surrender: you're fighting for a reason, you're fighting for your people, you're fighting for a dream of peace and quiet and the little boy that played on that field when times were still happy, when your eyes were soft and when you were still innocent.
The fanfare calls, the crimson flag raises, the scuttling of feet upon dusty ground is heard, and you know it's time for you to start killing others and yourself inside. And as you pocket some salve and grab some rations, you realize something. You know that it's really war when you fire that arrow, tug on that bow not because you want to live; you're breaking their lives, watching them collapse, blinking back the fact that they have families and mothers and children not because you want to live, but because you don't want to die. Because you don't want the mirror to break, the mirror reflected in the eyes of the living, the mirror that shows you a picture of quiet meadows and children's laughter, the mirror that pretends that Edward isn't the only person you really have, the mirror painting a lie of family with brother and mother and father-
(and home)
