It wasn't until they were already being led back through the tunnels by Wulfstan that the Sergeant broke the silence.
"Hey, Corporal."
The words lingered in the void under his helmet for a good few footsteps, his dulled senses sluggishly firing up again when he realized the words were addressed to him.
He blinked, and realized that the armored figure ahead of him had ever so slightly angled their blank gaze back towards him, peering over the machine gun slung over its shoulder.
"Yes, Sergeant?"
The Sergeant hadn't slowed in his march. The Corporal, despite keeping his gaze straight, was finding it hard to do the same.
"Just checking in on you. You've been pretty twitchy ever since we set foot in this camp yesterday."
They were coming up on a corner. The Corporal could see the figures ahead of the Sergeant already rounding it, a bare glimpse of their outlines passing by on his left.
"I'm fine now, Sergeant."
The answer seemed satisfactory enough for the Sergeant to set his gaze straight again- the Corporal figured that would be the end of it, but barely another footstep after he followed the Sergeant around the corner, the Sergeant's voice was ringing in his helmet again.
"You don't seem 'fine' to any of us."
If he were to be honest with himself, he didn't feel fine either. His body had stabilized itself- the throbbing in his shoulder was gone, his fingers could remain still now that his rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his breathing had receded back to its old raspy silence that he paid no heed to- but it was hard to pretend everything was 'fine' when every inch of what he could see outside of his squad was just...
...well, right now it was just a lot of dirt, the occasional door, and lamps.
"Don't get me wrong, we're all pretty fucked in the head ourselves- but there's a certain point where we've gotta start wondering if the guy we're trusting to watch our backs is gonna lose it out here in the field."
…
"That means you, Corporal."
"I know."
He began to pick up other voices starting to drift down the winding caves, most of them familiar from the night before, despite the distance.
"I know the Captain was going on about some stuff earlier. Don't think too much on it. Just keep it together- like you were before all this- and you'll be fine."
"That doesn't sound like what he meant." The words spilled out from his teeth before he could think them over. The Sergeant seemed less surprised than he was.
"And you know what he meant?"
He waited, tongue numb, as though the right answer would just come on its own again. A few footsteps later the distant voices grew closer, and his own voice remained quiet.
"No. I don't."
Their walk through the tunnels finally came to a halt, a door barely visible to the Corporal past the various figures standing in front of him. Muffled voices from behind briefly became clear as a thin, bold ray of light peeked out from behind the Sergeant.
"Wait here," he heard Wulfstan murmur to the rest of them before the light flickered out and the voices beyond the door slipped back into obscurity.
The Sergeant peered around back to him again.
"Just stay alive. Help keep us alive. Anything else- orders, feelings, whatever- that don't directly contribute to that are secondary. That's all it really boils down to right now."
"What about the Gallians? Aren't we following their orders now?"
He received a chuckle in response. It left him with an uncomfortable chill.
"That remains to be seen."
…
"But right now, they're not shooting at us. And as long as it's the Captain, not me, dealing with them, I'd rather not have them start shooting at us."
'The Captain'.
The Sergeant had always seemed ready to challenge the Captain. He could at least remember the Sergeant's adamant opposition to this whole idea- and it only made him wonder how much of it he hadn't heard, if the squad still discussed amongst themselves on their own radio channel.
"We work with them, they don't try to kill us. Simple enough."
The voices behind the door were starting to escalate- he strained his ears more, and could vaguely pick out the two Gallian Lieutenants' voices dominating. It didn't sound like they were going to be quieting down anytime soon.
He looked up, noticing the Sergeant had returned to his normal, front-facing posture.
"What…" He caught himself this time, mind inspecting the words churning out his voice-machine before they could roll off his tongue as though it were ready to scold him…
He ended up trailing off as he looked up, meeting the Sergeant's gaze. He leaned to the side, trying to see if he had suddenly caught the attention of the Lieutenant and Captain now too- he hadn't even considered they might've been listening in the whole time earlier. It hadn't mattered much then, but now…
The Sergeant continued to eye him silently, and the voices behind the door continued to battle away.
He took in a breath.
"What do you think about the Captain?"
The pause between his question and the Sergeant's response was shorter than he was expecting.
"That's a pretty broad question," the Sergeant said, resettling his gaze on the Lieutenant's back again.
A few moments thumped by before he continued. He spoke softly, funnily with none of the vitriol that seemed to so often lace his voice when he actually spoke to the Captain. "He'll do what it takes to keep us alive. Us, that is, including you."
The Sergeant sounded sincere- and the Captain had certainly proved that much about the Sergeant's claim before.
And yet, as the Corporal thought back to the events of the previous day- the Gallian militia personnel, all their bustle and boisterous chatter- he found himself strangely dissatisfied by the Sergeant's hanging silence after that.
He heard the Captain's voice in his head again, some words from yesterday's blurred speech becoming clear. He heard the exhaustion in them, the frustration. His mind wandered even further back, recalling the long pauses that had pockmarked the Captain's orders, the empty gaze of his staring off into nothing for moments too long.
And then he heard Lieutenant Gunther's voice from beyond the door, the fervor driving his shapeless words. That familiar surge of energy the Corporal also heard last night, when the Gallian Lieutenant had vouched for them all.
...
"Do you really think he can do that? Keep us all alive?"
...
The Captain didn't seem to think so in the morning.
…
So why was he even asking?
The Sergeant sighed.
"No, Corporal. That's why we need you to start pulling your own weight. That's what we've been trying to get through to you."
…
"Fuck me, I guess we were always pretty bad at talking this kinda shit out. You understand now though, don't you?"
He blinked, and finally started to see the dents and scratches that criss-crossed the surfaces of his squad's armored skin exposed under the dim lamplight. He started to notice that the Sergeant leaned on his right leg ever so slightly more than his left. It was so subtle he wouldn't have noticed had he not remembered the Captain mentioning the Sergeant had been wounded in one leg in Fhirald. He saw the radio on the Lieutenant's back, drawing a visceral mosaic with its twisted innards tenderly and futilely arranged into a uniform pattern that would not hold. And the Captain just stared forward, unmoving.
'Lost yourself?'
"I understand."
"Glad to hear it."
The Sergeant sounded anything but glad.