History
History is always causally logical. This event affects these events which cause this event. One moment can change the path of everything. One man dying on the battlefield can affect the outcome of the battle, whether he is a king, a commander or a private. But he will not be the only person to fall on that field. There will be hundreds more whose lives are just as interesting, just as important whose achievements will be cut short. The difference is the factor of history. Their deaths are not historically important. This is what Bookman Junior has always been told, the ideology he embraces. The overall tide of history is what must be recorded, the flow of time and action from event to event. Those whose lives form the current are merely background noise.
This is what Bookman is reminding him as they row into the Black Order headquarters, hands tucked primly in his sleeves. Bookman is staring past him, as he often does when he lectures him, as if he is reading it from a wall in the distance. It is a catechism he knows well: "Do not get involved", "Stay impartial". Watch for the turning points and forget everything else.
And it would have been easy, so easy, if he hadn't met them. Or met her.
He remembered the first time he saw her, in the middle of the mass funeral, his first contact with their war. His war. He had looked down, dispassionately. This wasn't the first death he had seen, and it wouldn't be the last. Even the scale didn't surprise him. After forty-eight wars he had become numb to the amount of themselves humans could kill through sheer stupidity. His eyes flitted over the mourners, bored, until something caught his attention. The feeling of being watched. It took him a while to spot her, crouched amongst a gaggle of nurses. She looked small, and young, and frail and utterly negligible, except for her eyes. They bored into him, even from this far away, with an intensity he'd never seen before. She was crying.
She cried for everyone, he found out later. She walked amongst the coffins and cried, laying a hand on one here, and another one there. She told him little things about every single one of them. Maurice liked dogs, had three at home. Mary played fourteen instruments and liked the rain. He recorded all of the names, for history, and all the details for himself. He recorded the way her hair stuck to her face when she cried. He recorded the way she sipped her tea. He recorded all the little details that were important to him, the hundreds, the thousands of way she made him feel wanted that history would forget.
He wondered sometimes, what life would have been like if he'd been the Bookman after. To look back at the Black Order, and look at her name and know nothing about her. It didn't seem fair, that all those who would come after wouldn't know that she couldn't whistle and she liked the colour blue. He wondered if there would be a time, when this was all over, when he could separate her name from the way she made him feel. If he could read it and not smile.
He wanted to hate her, for the way she could mourn. For the way she could fall in love. He thought if he could it would make it easier.
He didn't hate her of course. That would have been easy.
Instead he fell in love.
Instead he had to live with the knowledge that eventually he would abandon her. That love couldn't overcome history. She would be erased, eventually, in this war. She would die and he would write it down. Just the facts, when, where, how. It was better than nothing, to be included in this hidden history rather than just disappearing. He knew that.
A/N: I am in the middle of writing my dissertation. It's about zombies. It's slowly decreasing my brain function and devouring my creativity. I'm trying to get back into the swing of fanfic, please excuse any delays, blips, blurps or brainfarts.