vii
Caradoc Dearborn was his own man. Silence was his weapon, shadows his cloak.
He hadn't been invited into the Order, he simply walked in one day, his face void of any emotion, bringing truth of his worth (the arm was bloody, still slightly warm and the Mark was glowing).
No one ever doubted his abilities or loyalty, despite never seeing him fight alongside them.
He worked alone, always getting the job done (no questions asked) and he didn't fraternize (they had to know that caring meant getting hurt).
He liked being invisible, it meant staying safe, the perfect way to find out everything he needed (and to strike when least expected) and, most of all, it allowed him to be himself. There's no need to act and hide when he isn't seen.
And, oh, how much he wanted to keep himself whole and true and – himself.
The war had taken so much from all of them already, so that really wasn't too much to as, was it?
He never told anyone his story (reliving it every night was hard enough), never shared his reasons to join their fight, his fears (blood and pain and – really, what wasn't there to fear), his hopes (even knowing they wouldn't come true), why he gave all of his life for the cause.
Death didn't seem to mean anything to him (he knew it all to well), attacks never surprised him (he was waiting for them every step of the way), no wound managed to hurt him, no matter how deep (what else was his body than a mean to try to right some wrongs that had befallen their world?).
But he was his own man, not allowing himself to bow to somebody else's rules, always fighting on his own terms, changing the game until it fitted him perfectly.
He carved the scars out of his skin, making them his own, not able to live with marks on his body that pointed out his failures, his weaknesses, his not-being-good-enough. So he made them disappear under his own, hiding them in plain sight until only he himself knew their stories.
He learned much too late that, in war, everybody loses himself (that made him fall deep into the abyss he had tried so hard to avoid).
He realized that, no matter how hard he had worked to become invisible, despair had fought him and caught him and changed him (and hurt him and broke him and took everything he called his own) and he knew he wasn't his own man anymore, hadn't been for far too long.
But he was anything if not thorough. So the last scar to remove was he himself.
He went out one day and didn't come back, disappearing at last (and he thought they wouldn't miss him, because he had never really been there, but they did and they hurt because they had cared. And he had been his own man, but he had been theirs just as much and his death was a scar on their consciousness, proudly shown to the world, but he would have never understood that because he had only ever tried to be invisible. And hadn't that been his downfall?)
Next up: James
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