Disclaimer: I do not own W.I.T.C.H. or any of its characters in any shape or form.

Note: this is based off the cartoon series.

So this was written in a few hours because I just realised it is Red Hand Day (12 Feb every year!) and I can't NOT update this fic about the effects of PTSD on a child soldier on this day, the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers. Shout out to Val Marsal whose review I received earlier today made me remember. This chapter would be entirely dedicated to you if it were not dedicated to those children who fight as soldiers and rebels whether willingly or unwillingly.

This chapter is short and probably a bit hasty because of the time I took to write it, but next chapter will definitely be a lot longer given the content I'll cover. For all its shortcomings though, CxC as promised. And Caleb falling apart as usual. His girlfriend may or may not have something to do with that.

He was playing with her hair, winding each flaxen strand of it between his fingers. It felt like silk against his roughened, calloused skin – a juxtaposition that seemed as strange as it nearly did ugly. Yet, how could Caleb decry the marks of a warrior even on skin as young as his own? They were marks of a survivor some of his friends said. The marks of a good leader some of the older people during the Rebellion had told him quietly in those moments where he had been too weak to hide his worry completely.

Still, it wasn't only those from the Rebellion who bore such hands – Tynar did too, long before he switched sides. Warriors and soldiers were not confined to one side in a war, and that made it harder some days for the youth to see his calloused hands as those of a survivor. How many of the vile cronies under Phobus' command had used such hands to beat a hapless victim? How many had used them to throttle the life from someone?

(How many of the upstarts now had the same calloused hands, for all Caleb had to be on the good side?)

It was those calloused hands – when they had not been Cedric's reptilian ones – that had always grabbed the ex-rebel leader, captured him and imprisoned him. It must have been those hands that had taken his father and enslaved him to a fate perhaps coexistent with death. It was certainly those hands that tried to stop them when they broke free.

"What are you thinking of?" A lyrical question from a lyrical voice.

Caleb smiled down at the slender face that had tilted back to look at him. "Nothing." When a graceful eyebrow raised he amended himself. "Nothing much."

"And what is nothing much to you?"

Too much. He did not say that. He scarcely dared to think it.

"Do your parents dream?" he asked instead.

To her credit the Guardian of Earth remained unfazed by the abrupt turn of conversation.

"My dad says he doesn't," she said. "But mum says he just doesn't remember them and that everyone dreams. She's had a few really weird ones. Like the time the TV ate the stereo and spat up Elton John who sang a love rock-ballad with dad on their honeymoon in Hawaii while mum did the Macarena with Freddie Mercury."

Caleb didn't understand half of what the center of his universe had just said, and he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to. Still, it was an answer though it did little in resolving the turmoil inside himself. "Just weird dreams?"

"Good ones too, I'm sure."

"And…bad ones?" His fingers made to curl towards his palms and with effort Caleb stopped them. "What about nightmares?"

She was silent, that flower laying in his lap, her face unreadable as she stared at him. Whether she was trying to piece together what the question stemmed from or whether she was walking the path of memory he could not tell. Yet, from her he feared no judgment – he had no need to fear. A rarity in his short life, but one treasured much more because of it.

"I guess," came her words finally. "Everyone gets them from time to time." She rose from where she laid, blonde hair spilling down her back as she turned to face him. Her blue eyes were more serious than before. They seemed to pierce into Caleb's very heart. (He would not be surprised if they did; what was his heart but her?) "What is this about? You can tell me."

Fingers curled again and this time it was the long, slender hands of the Earth Guardian that stopped them. Caleb looked away.

"What would you do if your parents had one?" he asked.

Another look, a longer one. Then she shrugged and brushed her hand across the dirt. If flowers, small and colourful, bloomed in its wake then no one else saw but them in their own secluded section of the park.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never seen them have one."

Silence fell again, not uncomfortable but not peaceful either. Inside the mind of one youth worry wilted the natural glow of flowers. Inside the mind of the other memories of a dark night unlike most threatened to curdle the faith he had in the steadiness of the world.

A man he was now, yet for all his age and experience Caleb was still young. He did not have the words to ask what he truly needed to unburden the doubt weighing in his heart. The best he could do was the muddle through others in the hope that she would understand (and if he hoped in anything, still hoped at all, it was in her).

"I-" He stumbled to a stop. More memories came, older and worse than the first. Yet… And yet. It might work.

She was looking at him, as open and vulnerable as he needed himself to be (as he could never be, could never risk being and yet…). He could do this. He had to. (Couldn't afford not to. The roots of the world were shaking and if they shook hard enough than he would fall and everything he held dear with him).

The ex-rebel leader inhaled. "I still remember when they told me my father wasn't coming back."

An exhale, but it was not his own breath. Not now, not then. He hadn't been able to breath then. Hadn't been able to imagine going on, surviving to the next day. But he had.

("Your father…" The man had been unable to get out the words, unable to look into the wide green eyes that stared up at him.

It was only when Caleb first had to deliver the same message himself to another that he understood the complex wash of emotions that had graced the others face. Then, however, he had only been able to blink in a lack of comprehension and budding apprehension.

"Your father was ambushed," another broke in, this one a woman with a fierce jaw and crooked nose. Her words were blunt and bitter, but not as harsh as they could have been for a veteran of a seemingly hopeless war. "He did not make it back from the battlefield."

It was like all the air had been sucked from the entire world.)

"They told me he had been killed," Caleb said, almost too dully for the topic at hand. "Everyone hoped he had been. The alternative would have been worse – was worse."

He could have laughed. The world had been in a sorry state indeed if death had been better than the alternative. Only laughing would worry her, would make those ugly lines of concern wrinkle her face and that was the last thing he wanted. So he did not, swallowing that fey laughter instead.

(Somehow Caleb had been able to function beyond the news, as young as he was, not a man, but with a man's burden. Now a burden tripled in size. He had talked to the survivors of the ambush. He had talked to other patrols in the area. He had talked to the oldest among them and the wisest about what was to be done now about the Rebellion.

He had refrained from taking up his sword and charging to the place where his father had fallen, vengeance on his lips and suicidal fellness in his heart. He wanted to, wanted to so badly that it ached like a wound from a sword, but he did not. His father had fallen and he was leader. They would all look to him now and even if they did not he no longer had a shield to protect him in those moments of weakness.

The world had shook and it fell to him to be the shield on ever shakier ground.

So he brushed off the concern. Clasped an arm or two in silent acknowledgment of sorrows shared and moved on. His father was gone, but the Rebellion was not. Phobos was not. Duty demanded its doing.

When Caleb finally went to bed that night, alone beside a bedroll that would never again be slept in by its first owner – resources were scarce and all things of the missing or dead or worse were redistributed quickly – he had gotten no sleep. His head buried in his arms he thought of times that seemed so long ago but really were not at all, of being held in strong arms, a smile breaking on an ever-wearier face with every new word he learned, a hand ruffling his hair and cuddling him close when the racket around them was not so bad.

The boy thought of the last meal they had shared, weeks before his father had left so busy were they both with fighting and not dying and making sure others did not die. It had been a simple fare: rations with a little extra bread as a gift for something Julien had done for someone else. They had hardly spoken; they had no need for words that night.

Now how Caleb wished they had spoken of everything under the sun.

Unable to help himself, he cried.)

The young commander refused to cry now, refused to let that old, festering hurt still hurt him now. It did anyway, as it always did.

A fate worse than death…

"I moved on. You have to when you're helping lead a Rebellion," Caleb said plainly. "I didn't think about him as often as I should have as a grieving son. Then I thought about him less as other things, living things became more urgent."

He did not believe he had truly mourned his father's supposed passing before they had found a hint of him and then found the man himself. He still hadn't truly mourned all those who had died during the Rebellion and fall of Paradise. In war there was never time. He never had the time.

Caleb closed his eyes and breathed. The slender hands now stroking down his face helped.

"Your father had a nightmare." It was not a question.

"I didn't know what to do," Caleb gasped out. "I couldn't help him." I couldn't help him then either.

A rock, his rock to stand on. A shield to guard him that had been ripped away – he had forged another, but it was ill-fitting and too easily dented, and now the old shield could no longer cover him as well as it once had. He was vulnerable and it was damning.

"Caleb, it's okay." Those hands dropped from his face to take up his own fisted ones. The scent of rosemary drifted into the air and the youth relaxed, holding her hands back tenderly and desperately all at once. "It's okay."

"How can it be?" The orphaned boy had cried that as well, silently to himself.

"You're both not dead." A small smile, too tentative for her. Even in his distress Caleb wanted to wipe that tentativeness away. She shouldn't have to be tentative, not around him.

Get a grip. The harsh words had worked more than once during danger-induced panic and they worked now. The well of everything that had cracked open inside him slammed shut. He tried a smile and found it was not such an odd thing upon his face.

The youth pressed his forehead against his love's own, intimate and chaste even as she pressed back. For a while they stayed like that, silence leaking between them where words had no place. Nose to nose they breathed each other's breath as they often did, perhaps imagining themselves the Guardians of Air as they did so if either were inclined to such fantasies. But the reality was just as powerful. More so, for neither of them could control the winds nor the currents that let the birds soar or the breeze that caressed every leaf it passed, but they could control this. Them. And they needed no special Powers to do so.

She inhaled as all flowers did. "So, your father had a nightmare. What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know!"

In the quiet that had once been Caleb erupted violently. Yet, she simply gripped his hands tighter and pressed their heads even closer. The air from their lungs mingled between them even more, the same breath sustaining them both at once. In and out. In and out. Together even if the world should fall apart.

"I don't know," he said again, calmer now.

"Has he said anything?"

"No. He just held me after he woke." Had held him together even as he fell to pieces. (But now they were both cracked and cracked stone never made for solid foundations or strong defences…)

The Guardian of Earth tilted her head. "Why don't you try talking to him then?"

Caleb looked away. There were many things wrong with the suggestion (and yet nothing at all). Not least among them was that talking would confirm what had happened as real. That it was not some sort of sleep deprived hallucination Caleb had seen. And if it was real-

It felt like he was going to lose his father again, an irrational fear perhaps, but one he could not help having. He remembered too well the night when the other rebels had returned from battle, but his father had not. He remembered it too well.

(His tears had been gone by dawn, though the pain shadowed the boy wherever he went at times seemingly only visible to himself.)

She drew back, frowning at him as a finger flicker his shoulder only half playfully. "You should. It could help."

"Hmmm…" It was as much commitment as he was prepared to give, even to her. Instead he brushed the yellow and purple blooms with half-cupped petals. "What flowers are these?"

"Crocus," came the reply in that fragrant voice. "Talking about Freddie Mercury got me thinking about history – Earth history I mean. There was a Roman god by the name based off some Greek one… Anyway, they have symbols and I've been researching flowers because I'm the Guardian of Earth and I should know my own element-"

"I'm sorry," Caleb interrupted, paying attention to the other issue gnawing ceaselessly at him at last. "What in Meridian's name is a Freddie Mercury? Some sort of torture device? And why would you do a Macarena with it?"

For a moment there was silence. Then came the laughter, clear and ringing and as beautiful as a bell wrought from gold and silver and starlight must be. It was the laughter of flowers, sweet and serene. Caleb could have listened to it forever even if it was laughing at him.

"Freddie Mercury was a rock singer in a band called 'Queen' decades ago," the flowers tittered. "He was really good. And the Macarena is the name of a specific dance. I'll show you one time."

"You could show me now."

"Hmm." Blonde hair flipped in the sunlight. "I'm comfortable and we're in public. I can show you one of Freddie's songs though. …And don't tell Imra or Will you don't know the Macarena."

She reached for her bag discarded almost carelessly beside them, digging through it for the music carrying box she always had. He watched her, the errant strand of hair that had dropped over her face, the hunch of her shoulders as she pushed her arm deeper into the bag, the little frown on her face as she blindly groped for what she wanted.

But the Guardian of Earth was the Guardian of dirt and rock for a reason. She was steady in most things and her determination, when evoked, was unwavering.

"Most psychs say talking helps," she said to the air.

"Psychs?"

"Psychologists." At his still confused look, she expanded. "People who learn how to help other people deal with things in their head when those things become problems. Things like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"Oh." He remembered that name. He remembered not liking the implications it made.

"You don't have any people like that in Meridian?"

"No." Did they? He doubted it. No one specialised in the area of the mind who was not aiming to use that specialisation for power. It had been one of Phobos' fouler methods to oppress those he sought to rule, and to think of her…

"Here." A flower handed him her headphones, head still bowed as she played with the device connected to them. Catching his perplexed look as her eyes flicked briefly upwards, she sniffed and tossed her hair. "Clearly you need to be educated on the best music of Earth's past."

Never one to fully trust the other when her mood was such, eyes gleaming with a passling's mischievousness, Caleb slowly slipped the headphones on. The next moment he ripped them off and stared at the keeper of his heart accusingly.

"That was not music!" he cried.

"It's called the Bohemian Rhapsody. I sped it up to my favourite part," she said smugly.

"That was- That-" He waved his arm having no words to describe it. "Sometimes I don't understand you Earth dwellers."

"And sometimes I don't understand you. I guess that makes us even." The words were said with a little peck to his cheek softening the snark just a little.

Caleb grinned, not one to be outdone in flustering the other. "No, this does."

Then he lunged at her, bringing one hand to her head and the other to her back as he bore them to the ground. His lips crashed on those soft as a petal, careful and tender even in his passion. Those same lips parted in greeting as they curved into a wanton smile. For one breath, then two, then three, then more they held together until both their lungs were screaming for air. When they drew apart, however, they did so quickly before sinking back into a less frenzied and fonder thing.

Those slender hands had found his hair, were tangling themselves in his short strands even as he shivered as her own brushed his cheeks. He shivered further at the sight of golden flax spread among the green and purple of crushed flowers. Her eyes were dilated with desire. Yet, they went no further than this, content enough as they were to hold and kiss like two children freshly delving into the art of love. Children they were, at least in this, and it mattered not to either one of them.

More than that, to Caleb he also held a rock. Smooth and silken were the skin and hair he touched, but beneath laid the reason she had been chosen as the Guardian of Earth. What mountain bowed to the roots that shook around them, that ever-unsteady world ready to shift treacherously beneath one's feet? A mountain's roots went deeper and were of immovable stone. Perhaps from them he could form a new shield, could rework and reinforce his old one so it fit a little better around him. She would let him, of that there was no doubt. She would help him, and as they kissed Caleb found himself a little less vulnerable than he had been.

And if those flowers whispered that he should speak to his father, perhaps this once he listened.

I've taken some liberties with Cornelia being interested at least a little in history (ancient at least) plus thought she would develop an interest in the meaning of flowers after gaining her powers. Fun fact - Crocus is one of the sacred plants of Hermes, the Ancient Greek god the Roman god, Mercury, was derived from. Crocus also symbolises cheerfulness, gladness, youthfulness and mirth - perhaps things a certain someone wished for someone else. ;)

Next chapter covers another prompt and while no CxC appears (at this stage anyway), it is father-son based with a dash of mother besides. And Vathek because it's been far too long since I last wrote him. Don't expect a quick update though - this was a one off on quickness. I'm going to be focusing on my own fiction writing for once!

Some facts about child soldiers for those who are interested (and even those who are not):

Child soldiers can range from as young as 4 to late teens.

Not all children are fighters - some are cooks, messengers, informers, spies or used for sex.

50 countries/States still use child soldiers and many more militant groups.

There is an international treaty aimed at ending the use of child soldiers - 18 years old!

I hope that you enjoyed this. Please leave a review! I love receiving them.