How have you guys been doing?
I apologize for the absence. I had an exam and an essay this past week so I wasn't in the right mindset to write this story. Anyways, here's chapter 35!
mykasa: Great to have you back, mykasa!
An Eldian's Journal
The Soul of War
Chapter 35: A beautiful minute
I watched in silence as the petit river of cadets floated along towards their respective barracks. Their uniforms rippled in the current as my heart rippled a tear to see humans barely within the range of puberty ready to fight. They were peppered by the sprinkling rain, or that could have just been the propaganda they so gladly ingested.
What a shame.
I turned away from the tadpole cadets and stepped along the unsettled dirt. The ground was frightened because it learned too late that it had to prepare for more feet to run upon it. The soldier that barred me from before let go, and I plodded towards something.
Not towards answers to my questions.
Just the barracks.
In those minutes, I had temporarily lost fear for Kaslow. I knew he would reprimand me if he didn't see me running laps when he got back from the titan combat training. I just wanted to lie down. Of course, when I returned to the barracks, there was a friendly reminder waiting outside.
It was my bed's mattress sitting depressed and limp like a bandage of a wounded soldier. Soaked in faulty water, it sat on the ground as a corpse withering away. The rat from before came out from underneath and let out a territorial squeak. It looked like it had a home.
I used to have one of those as well,
Even though it was utter shit.
I went inside the barracks and stared at my comfort-less bed. The pile of metal toothpicks that were the frame ached me as I laid my stomach down onto it. My bag of belongings stared at me from the ground. The eyes of Mr. Kruger's journal peered at me; within the pages were pupils and behind them was something I wanted to know.
I hadn't opened that journal in the one month I had been in the training camp, and with that, I built up some unanticipated tension. Every time I looked at it, I grew unnecessarily nervous. I was building expectations for something I wasn't sure really deserved it.
So, I wanted to relieve it.
I reached out to the bag and pulled out the journal. Its skin was itchy and musty, much like Mr. Kruger himself. The words inside must have soaked into the pages and dried out whatever little life was in the book's structure.
All I wanted to do was open the cover to see a glimpse inside to satisfy my curiosity for a little while. I wanted to read it with Mr. Kruger when I got back. Alas, I turned the cover and unveiled the story underneath.
In lieu of pencil lead and handmade words, I found legions of printed ink. Each word or phrase was cut out from something and stuck onto the page. Had Mr. Kruger used words from newspapers to tell his story? I shut the journal immediately and pondered as to why he would spend all that time doing it.
That was enough surprises for the day, I thought. I set the journal aside and returned to the aches of the metal bed frame. I didn't want to make sense of the contents of those words at that moment. The curiosity was satiated for that day.
***A FEW UNEXPECTED SOUNDS***
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
A few minutes after peeking into Mr. Kruger's journal, I heard someone knocking on the door. They knocked for a second round and came in shortly after as if the sounds were just warnings for their arrival. It was the wall-keeper in his enigmatic glory. Another man for whom I came to think of a puzzle, no matter how many times I berated myself for thinking of people that way.
"Cadet, why are you not running laps?"
I swiftly got up into a sitting position. "I ran ten already." He raised his eyebrow. "I ran ten already, sir."
The solid gaze grew more potent as he approached me. I wondered how everyone got done with the training exercises and returned to camp so quickly.
He stood above me as the toned, middle-aged tree he embodied and pulled out something from his holster. He pointed it at me.
It was a handgun.
I backed away from the weapon, and the wall-keeper sat down on my metal bed frame. He pulled the gun back and set it down. My back softened a bit.
"S-Sir?"
"It's been a while since I talked to you in my office, Steiner. You didn't act suspiciously these past few weeks but when I looked through the barrack windows a few minutes ago to see you lying down here…I wondered what you were doing."
"..."
He massaged the gun in his hand. "There's three things I can take from what I saw, Steiner." I gulped, and a blanket of warmth prickled my body. "One. You were writing letters of correspondence to leak information, taking advantage of the chance Commander Magath gave you-"
"I wasn't doing anything like that!" He pointed the gun back at me.
"Two. You stole documents and are hiding them in the bed frame where officials would least expect it."
"..."
The third one made the most sense. "Three…You grew tired of Kaslow being a dickhead and gave up on his demands...which one is it?" I was shocked by the use of 'dickhead'
"None of them, sir...I just saw someone familiar in the group of cadets that arrived."
"Hmmph." He played with the gun's small barrel. "The warrior candidates, huh?"
"Yes, sir."
The wall-keeper looked down at my bag of belongings and caught the journal peeping out at us. It was a voyeur to our conversation. He picked it up and held its spine carefully. I wasn't expecting him to be gentle with it. His oval face simulated concern; I was expecting some fury.
"That's from the homeless man, the homeless man that you wounded...sir," I muttered.
"Walter Kruger, huh?" There was no flinch in his face, only a muted awe. Did he happen to know Mr. Kruger's real name all along? "He spelled his name out with newspaper letters…." The wall-keeper flipped through the journal as if he had forgotten he was supposed to be accusing me of something. "Look out the window, Heinrich, I think your friends are out there."
I looked out the window to see the boys in the distance walking into the dining room.
I turned back around to hear the wallkeeper say, "I am confiscating this."
"W-Why?!"
He flipped through the pages to show a folded-up piece of paper with information written on it. "There's confidential information written here," the wall-keeper said in a monotone voice.
"What?" There was no spite in that word. Just the pure confusion of what was happening.
The wallkeeper's following words are some that shattered the tender glass that was my mental state.
***BETRAYAL***
"This...Walter Kruger...may have been setting you up."
No.
No.
No.
I didn't want to believe a word the man sitting next to me said. He came in unannounced into the barracks accusing me of being some spy and then told me I was set up by the one man that opened my perspective to the real world?
He showed me the gun and took out the magazine. There were no bullets in it. I watched in speechlessness like a shattered piece of glass while he walked out of the barracks.
Why was everyone out to ruin me?
I sat in the barracks by myself, marinating in the pregnant pause of solitude. The only thing that got me out of there was the thought of my friends and the hunger that occupied my stomach. The potholes in the ground felt more pronounced than they were supposed to, but I walked to the dining room anyway.
I sat down at a table with some inedible-looking and inedible food. Viktor approached shortly after with macaroni and cheese, or more accurately, macaroni and mold. "Me and Kurt failed."
"How did you fail?" I asked, lifting up a portion of mold to my mouth.
"We failed pretty badly."
"Ok. But why did you fail pretty badly?"
"We failed pretty badly."
"Ok but what did you do that made you fail?"
"We just failed."
I ate the macaroni, giving up on trying to get information out of the moron. Thankfully, Kurt came over with a rock masquerading as bread and answered the question for me. "Viktor shot the tire of the army truck instead of the titan."
Classic Viktor.
"How did you fail Kurt?"
He gnawed on the rock. "My gun jammed."
A critical thought crossed my mind as the macaroni dissolved sadly in my mouth. It was unapologetic for its taste. Kurt seized his battle with the masquerading rock and asked, "That exercise is a part of rifle training, right?"
"Yes," I answered.
"What happens if we don't pass weapons training?"
I put my spoon down. "I don't know...but we were told our medic training is specialist training. We have to pass rifle training and other training before we can get to that."
Kurt served Viktor and me a dish of bluntness: "That isn't happening anytime soon. I can barely pass my physical tests and our rifle skills are a disaster. There is no way we will become combat medics on the regular schedule."
Viktor coughed on his food. "Wait a second," and swallowed. "If Magath-"
I interrupted. "Commander Magath. If Kaslow heard you he would make you run laps...like I had to do..."
"Fine...if Commander Magath gave us this opportunity, shouldn't we be guaranteed to get all the way through?"
Kurt: "You said it yourself, Viktor. He gave an opportunity, not a guarantee. We have to do proper work here."
I put my hands in my hair and lowered them onto my face. "Why are we still in hell?"
"We are training for a war." Viktor finished his dish. "We left one hell just to go to a different one." I stared at my hands as I let Viktor's statement soak in. The remnants of dried-out mud were still there, clinging on uselessly.
We left for our second half of training after a short contemplation on our place in this training camp. The soldier in the sky turned off the faucet that made rain and started taking out his cloud-like plates and bowls. The sink that was the battlefield grew less suffocated, but of course, there were still discourse elements everywhere.
For example, ready to suffocate us at any moment, Kaslow came yelling through the dining room and telling us to get ready for the rest of the day's training. He waddled out of the dining room with us in tow. My stomach was ready to hurl some macaroni.
As always, I was a subject of Kaslow's berating. "Steiner, who said you could eat food? I told you to run laps for the rest of the day!"
"I ran laps, sarge."
"Yes, but who said you could eat food?!"
"No one did, sarge."
"You look more depressed than usual. That's good. That means I'm wearing you down."
He flipped his gaze to the wall-keeper. "Hey Husenbooger, why are you wearing sunglasses?"
The wall-keeper wore a pair of black aviators. "It's sunny outside, sarge."
"What sun? There isn't a drop of sun in the sky. Do you see the sun in the sky, Eldian circus monkey?" He turned towards Kurt.
"No, sir." Kaslow raised both eyebrows. "No, sarge."
"Exactly." Kaslow started walking away, but 5 seconds later, he stopped and turned around again. "Oh, I know what it is. You're trying to look good for the nurses, aren't you, Husenboogerburger?"
"Sure...sarge."
"I knew it."
I almost appreciated Kaslow's teasing of the wall-keeper. The wall-keeper deserved it after all the annoyances he put upon me. Alas, for the rest of the day, we continued with more muscle-tearing exercising and training. At the end of it, Kaslow left us with one gift: a statement. "Prepare for a surprise."
As if my day wasn't filled with enough surprises already.
I wiped my face in the bathroom free of the muck I had accumulated throughout the day after training. The nakedness of a 15-year-old's fresh face was off-putting, for I wasn't used to something so clean in the training camp. It was...weird. All the bunkmates, after washing themselves, looked like crabs that found themselves new shells on the beach after rejecting their old ones.
With the sunlight diminishing, we ate our dinners and headed back to the barracks.
My eyelids flirted with the idea of sleep for my birthday was indeed the worst a human could have for a birthday in general. The day was like a blacksmith's shop; there were rusty and wounded weapons everywhere, just like the thoughts in my mind. When arriving at the barracks, I tried to lie down on the metal frame for some sleep, but one of the bunkmates raised something sacred from his own bag of belongings: a pack of playing cards.
Which meant my eyes' wish for sleep was rejected.
The bunkmates gathered on the floor of the barracks. The floor was the table for their shenanigans. These guys had played cards in the first few weeks, but they had always done it without items on the line. This time, they were a tad riskier betting stolen snacks and hand-rolled cigarettes.
They played that for a while until 10 pm, and they grew tired of the cards (mainly because they ran out of things to bet on). Those few hours were amusing to me though, how could these people look so joyous with all that was going on? If I were to do something fun, it would be stifled by the ever-looming fact that it would end soon because of the painful situation we were in.
The cards were put back into the bag of belongings, and the boys and I stayed lying on our 2.5 beds. We weren't invited to this nightly social. Interestingly enough, the next activity didn't require us to be directly involved. A story was told.
One of the cadets, whom I mentioned chapters ago as "the narrator," rose to the occasion. His petit beard made him like a bard, a storyteller from the olden days with castles and plagues. He separated himself from the group slightly so everyone could get a view of him. The candle flickered as if it was watching anxiously as well from the corner of the room.
"I don't remember my parents' faces." The narrator's face was earnest in the beginning, simple and solemn. We had all been expecting a story; instead, we got a sorrow-filled statement. The one to respond to this was none other than a boy on the bed next to me: Viktor. While looking up at the ceiling, he said, "You have to think of them in the context of a memory. Something you've done together." He would know this well; his parents were dead.
The narrator gave a brief smile before bouncing his gaze between the bunkmates sitting around him. "Well, there was this time back in high school...I was around 18 years old or so….I had a group of friends and they all had girlfriends….I appreciated the life of the lone wolf." He took a pause before another beardy smile came out. "My friends didn't want me to be one though, so they tried setting me up. My best friend's girlfriend had a female friend that she wanted to set up with someone…."
I rolled my eyes at the generic story; luckily, no one could see them since I looked up at the ceiling. I expected the story to end with the narrator's parents catching them having sex or kissing or something.
The narrator continued. "I said 'Fine. I'll meet with her. Just tell her to come to my parent's diner at 7 pm on Friday.' The day came around and I waited by a table near the window at the diner. I was nervous as you would expect...it didn't help that I forgot to comb my hair…." He took a deep breath. "Then, a woman showed up at the diner entrance-"
"Was it the girl?" Milo interrupted.
"Let me finish...anyway, the woman walked around the room as if she was looking for something. Bear in mind, I knew nothing about what the girl I was supposed to meet up with looked like so I was going in blind...This woman got closer and closer to my table and asked for my name…." He slapped his face. "The woman was the girl my friends were trying to set me up with...god damn she was uglier than a titan."
The narrator laughed, and chuckles from the other bunkmates floated throughout the barracks. My expectations were subverted.
He continued. "My parents were behind the counter and they said, 'Son, you could have found one better than that.'"
Everyone coughed up their lungs with laughter, except Kurt and me, of course. I was too depressed for humor, but I could appreciate what was being done. Kurt, unfortunately, threw realism into the picture as always; he asked the narrator, "You're from section F, right?"
The machine guns of laughter muted shortly. "Yes."
"We don't have a high school."
I didn't even pick up on that. I was engrossed enough in the story that I just listened and forgot the truths of section F. This led to a hint of deception from the narrator. Everyone turned their heads from Kurt back to the narrator. The irony of it was, I think everyone was angrier at Kurt than anything.
We all had a moment that felt real. My thoughts wore a mask of positivity for once. It was the first time something like that happened during those training months.
A beautiful minute in a ruthless 24 hours.
Kurt had to go and ruin it.
I guess we are in that stage of the story where bombing threats have transformed into more direct threats. There were different kinds of crow-like sirens this time around. Some were vultures and falcons. One of them was even Kaslow.
He burst into our door. "Get dressed, cadets! We have to evacuate!"
We all scrambled to throw on our uniforms and get essential belongings, and we all crammed ourselves through the door. The camp was veiled in the nighttime darkness. My only confusion was why no official siren was playing. Only Kaslow was telling us to evacuate.
"This is the surprise I was telling you about, devils. It's time for night recon training!"
Fuck you, Kaslow.
If I wasn't stuck in the internment zones writing this pathetic journal, I would shove a rifle in your goddamn mouth for all the shit you pulled on me. Pig.
Oops, did I just say that? Excuse me.