It was Anya who had wanted the fresh start, the family, the picket-fence life. Not him. He was a soldier, a fighter. He was a Gear, and no matter what they said about serving his duty and an honorable discharge, Marcus knew he would always be a Gear. That's all he was. He had fought the bloodiest of battles, he had lost everything. And then Anya came, sitting down beside him on that beach that should have been the symbol for something new and wasn't. She had come and placed her hand in his, saying that they finally had a tomorrow.
There was only one problem with that. He didn't have a tomorrow. His whole life, everything that he was, was in his past. His father, who he had lost, only to have the chance to save him and then watch him die again. Dom, his comrade, his friend, something so much more than a brother. Even Anya, his once lover, was in the past. Anya was left almost untouched by the war, like it had all glanced off of her with only minor damage. But it had changed Marcus. The war had utterly destroyed him. It had taken everything that he was and put it through a grinder, shredding his life to pieces before his very eyes.
And Anya wanted to say that they finally had a tomorrow? There was no tomorrow. There was no moving forward after this. Marcus would learn to function – he always did – but that would be the end of it. He would adapt and survive because he didn't know how to do anything less, but that's all he would be doing from now on, surviving. There were pieces of him missing that he would never get back, that he could never even dream of coping with, and yet somehow he would pull what was left of him together and drag steadily onward, broken and bloodied and hollow, but moving, like any good soldier. Like any true hero.
She had wanted to settle down, and considering she was the only thing left from his old life, no matter how much he hated it now, he pulled strings to get her the modern equivalent of a picket-fence house. It wasn't so much of pulling strings as it was just going up to the right people and saying what he wanted. Delta squad had almost single-handedly saved the human race. The rest of the world owed them, or at least, that seemed to be the mentality. Marcus hated it, the same way he hated his memories, the same way he hated his nightmares, but as much as he hated it, he used it for Anya. He had gotten the house for her, pretty much just handed over to him on a silver platter to give to her and she was thrilled. But all Marcus saw were white walls and a big yard that should have been Dom's. All he saw were the things that should have belonged to his brother, to his father. Anya, on the first night in the house, slept in a peace Marcuse couldn't remember ever having. Marcus spent the entire night sitting in a corner, facing the door with his lancer ready, unable to sleep. The second night he wept.
Marcus could function around Anya to make himself look the way any doting husband should. He said all the right things, moved the right way, kissed her at the right times, but to him it was like navigating a minefield. Any screw up and she would be asking him what was wrong, unknowingly dredging into memories he would rather forget, digging down into the filthiest parts of what he hated himself for and bringing it to the surface of his mind. He could fight them back, the memories, but each time it got harder, and each time he felt more hollow and weak.
And it was Anya who had wanted children, not Marcus. He knew he wouldn't be able to take care of them. He was exhausted enough dancing on eggshells around Anya, but to care for a child as well? The endeavor was not the most intelligent, if not the most dangerous and Marcus would kill himself if he ever let himself harm a child by simply being who he was now. In all honesty, he would not wish himself on anyone. He had all but begged her to stop asking him for children, but when she would demand an explanation as to why a married couple in an almost extinct race should not have children, he could only say one phrase.
"I just can't," he would say. "I just can't. Anything but this." And he meant it. Anya could have asked to be crowned queen of the surviving humans and Marcus would have found a way to give it to her. Anything but making him live the horror of trying to protect children from the very nightmare that had become his life.
When she had found out she couldn't have children, Anya had been devastated. Children had been her dream, her future. All she had ever wanted since this damn war started was to have a safe home and be a mother. It was petty and childish, but she had wanted it so bad that she had latched on to the non-existent image of her and Marcus in a white house full of children and had clung to it for dear life. At times, when things were going all to hell and there was nothing to give her a reason to keep alive, she would dust off that mental image and keep going. And then she realized she was barren, sterile. She knew it was nothing she could have controlled, but the very knowledge screamed in her head, yelling that she was unworthy to be a mother. She was determined to prove the screaming wrong.
She had brought up adopting God knows how many times. There were certainly enough children without parents that needed a home. Marcus wouldn't budge though. He just couldn't do what she asked. In the end, he figured, that was the last thing, the final straw. There had been too many pieces that were straining everything that they did, and that had just been the one thing to make her get up from the couch, grab her bag, and just walk out the door, leaving him with a house that haunted him, a torn-apart soul, and a mind too shattered to even begin picking up the pieces.