ikanisfish: Yes, looks like I made it too obvious...Good job being correct for the first time haha

The last chapter got very dark and this one will be as well. Don't worry though. The next one should hopefully be lighter.

An Eldian's Journal

The Soul of War

Chapter 33: Tainted

Kaslow required us to do more training that day; he shoved the fact that he shot Milo in the leg underneath a rug as if it was a general occurrence. Milo was sent to the medical tent after I bandaged him. Still, by mid-day, he was released, and Kaslow forced him to continue with the exercises. "Use your other leg, dammit! Do you think those mid-east bastards are going to pity you if this happened on the battlefield?!"

I kept my distance from Milo the whole time because I didn't know how to handle my bully getting bullied.

When our training was over, the boys and I went to the dining hall for dinner. Kurt had returned from cleaning the bathroom with someone else's brush. I wallowed in my anxiousness, and in it, I almost overlooked the horrid food quality.

Grenades were stolen from the ground and slightly softened into stale bread. Worms were ripped from the grass they thrived in to be boiled and thrown onto a plate as spaghetti; red guts were sprinkled on top as the tomato sauce. Bullets were taken out of bodies and were squeezed to make some homemade meatballs. We are what we eat; we were bullets for Marley's military.

(I exaggerate. But you know me by now, I guess.)

After we sat down at a table, Viktor attempted to cheer me up. "You should eat that. I heard bread gives you abs."

Kurt chimed in, smelling like day-old shit. "I think its gonna give him diarrhea instead."

I bit the grenade-like bread, and an explosion of blandness went off in my mouth. My teeth were causalities to the explosion and began to ache. I dropped my fork onto the plate. The "spaghetti" didn't even cave in from the weight of the metal.

"I think I'm going to sleep early today," I said while trying my best not to yell.

Tension wrinkled the corners of my vision as I walked out of the dining hall. When I looked up, I noticed that the lone stranger in the sky had gone to sleep for the night and to replenish its guns. As a replacement, a shield stood quivering, deflecting the bullets of lights from afar and putting them onto us.

As I walked back to the barracks, my training uniform ached on my skin, so much so I nearly longed for the rags I had grown used to back in the internment zone. I missed my newsboy hat. Even the newspapers.

A candle's flame-licked around the walls of the room unequally when I arrived at the barracks. I walked over to my bed and looked down at the green uniform lingering on my chest. I clawed at it selfishly as if ripping it would drain me of my turmoil; the feeling of cloth digging into nails was satiating. But then I looked at my bag, untainted by the flickering light. The tobacco was still in there waiting to taint me.

My fingers let go of the training uniform and were seduced by the thought of the plant soothing my bruised mind. I had no willpower at that time, so I let them get drawn in. I pulled out the rolling paper and the plant. It was so green, so simple, but contained so much power.

I rolled a cigarette.

Was I devolving to relying on drugs to soothe me? Was I going to become a chaotic mess like the cigarette wielder? None of these things crossed my mind as I grew consumed with instant gratification.

I walked to the candle and used it as a lighter while careful not to burn the cigarette too much. I walked out of the barracks afterwards to avoid getting too much smoke in the living quarters. The silver shield in the sky looked on me with half its face, and the other half was shadowed. You see, the moon and I have a thing in common; we both are shadowed by something.

I took a drag on the cigarette under the blanket of stars.

As if I was a car engine, my lungs combusted and convulsed, repeatedly pushing out the false air. The coughing was relentless. It took a few seconds, but a light buzz pleasured my mind as a trade-off to the coughing.

I forced myself to try it again.

'How can you do this so easily, Lina?' I asked the memory of the cigarette wielder in my mind.

No one replied.

I took another drag, and the recipe of irritation continued. I was barely halfway done with the cigarette when I gave up on it and stomped it under my foot. It laid on the ground like a smothered insect with its legs away from the body.

I cuddled with the memories of section F's characters as I sat on a set of wooden planks. The always homeless Mr. Kruger sat somewhere on the street petting some stray dog to whom he confided non-verbal words. His guitar laid behind him, waiting eagerly to be strummed again—it was a disjointed family.

In my memory, somewhere on the road, the cabbage man was out and about swindling individuals as an occupation with his cabbages. I kicked him out of my walk through memory lane and floated to a different house instead. I recognized my home right next to it. In the backyard of this 'different house' was a girl washing some clothes.

The raven hair of the cigarette wielder was restrained to a motherly looking bun. Her sleeves were rolled up as she went about her duties with a veil of lifelessness on her face. The diamond laid dull and limp.

I wondered what was going on in her head. 'What does she think about?'

I gave up on that question, and it fizzled out like a coin losing its momentum upon my realization.

The supposed crush I had on Lina was just some infatuation and objectification of some girl that was three years older than me. I applied all the perverseness of my pathetic imagination to one person. What if she was just a regular person all this time, and I wanted to find something beyond that wasn't there?

I wondered if it was the same with Mr. Kruger. What if he was just some demented old man like the millions more in this world?

I didn't enjoy their presence while I was still around them. Instead, I was busy hanging onto every line the people said as evidence for "who they actually were" rather than being present with them. I guess that's what all people are to me, puzzles.

Puzzles that need to be solved.

Puzzles that need to be cracked so I can find out what's in the black box of their minds.

I jumped out of the memory lane to find my throat aching, and my face was waterlogged. I rubbed my sleeve on my eyes to feel some unreserved dampness. It is the kind that makes you wonder if you were crying from the smoke you were breathing or your heart's expression of pain.

I found out it was the latter.

The corners of my vision hazed as I let my heart feel the pain it didn't allow itself to from before, compounded by the cruelty I had to witness.

As the water flowed, I noticed the silhouettes of two figures in the distance. As they approached, I could make out some freckles, and on the other, there was some chocolate hair. These silhouettes filled themselves out as they came closer—it was Viktor and Kurt. They sat next to me on the set of wooden planks as a few stray lights turned on in the training camp.

Viktor said with some tomato sauce on his cheek. "I hope you don't mind that I ate your bread." I did my best to turn off the tap of tears while he continued. "I didn't think you would mind anyway." I was expecting the boys to try to console me and make me feel better. Instead, they didn't directly acknowledge my state of turmoil.

Viktor wanted to answer a question I had asked him during a time he was slightly drunk. "Heinrich, you remember when you asked me why I was so eager to join you? You didn't let me answer. Do you want to know now?"

"You're probably going to say something that will get us in trouble."

He opened his mouth as if he was going to refute that statement. He deflected and said, "Actually, I'm curious. Why did you join, Kurt? None of the gang members wanted to go except you."

Kurt looked surprised as he didn't expect to become the subject of conversation. He shifted a little in his sitting position and looked away from us. "Well...people think I'm weird for my twitching face and asthma even though its none of my fault..."

"Yes...we know." Viktor replied.

"People are mean because of it..."

"Yes...we know that as well."

"I'm afraid that..."

"Spit it out, Kurt."

Kurt blurted it out in one statement. "I'd rather die out here than in that internment zone!"

"Kurt..."

"In the future, people probably won't give me a job just because of these conditions. I would be useless...maybe here I would be more useful."

"Kurt, Kaslow made you clean a bathroom with a toothbrush for crying out loud. How is this any more useful than what you did in the internment zone?!"

Kurt's gaze stayed glued to the ground. I haven't seen his face anymore still than it was that second. "It'll be better. We will just have to make it better."

Viktor let the words rest in the air. I let them soak into my already wounded mind; it was almost comforting to know that I wasn't the only sad soul. We watched as people returned to their barracks; it was like birdwatching, for we saw flocks of birds returning to their nests for the night. Viktor waited until most people were gone to give his reason for joining.

"If we do good on our duties here, Eldians in Section F will take us seriously...maybe then they'll listen to us...maybe then we can get ourselves out of the internment zone..."

I felt a sudden annoyance. "Why do you think like this? Where do ideas like this come from?"

"My brain...and if you haven't noticed, my sister and I are weird people. We've always been screwed up."

I was almost afraid to ask. "How...how would we get out of the internment zone?"

He got off the planks, and his stare on me was more potent than the time we watched those fireworks when we were 12. "Uprising, of course."

"I thought you grew out of that idea."

"It was gone...until this chance came around."

I watched Viktor walk back into the barracks as multiple struggles itched my head. Kurt's left-field answer to why he was here and Viktor's devolution into a child again mixed into a concoction with the sight I had to experience earlier that day. My head felt like it was drudged in tar...and I almost wanted a cigarette again.

XXX

I laid down on my bed with the candle flame flickering on the ceiling. The boys were on the bunks next to me, and we remained wordless to each other. The bunkmates trickled in one by one as my sorrows weighed on my eyes and tried to put me to sleep.

I turned around and laid on my stomach to see my bag sitting innocently on the ground. The corners of Mr. Kruger's journal peaked through the cloth to form a faint outline. I looked at it as my eyes lulled to sleep.

When I woke up, I was surprised to see the world outside hadn't done the same. The bullets of sunlight weren't out yet, but the shield-like moon still was. Instead of seeing the lone stranger walking on the horizon, I found a soldier standing right next to my bed while holding my collar.

It looked at me as if it came out of a grave just for some revenge.

It took me a few seconds to realize who it was; it was Milo, the bully.

He picked me off the bed and threw me onto the ground. He kneeled, but instead of healing wounds, he made some for me. He took his fists and landed repeated attacks. In between beatings, I hoped that one of his punches would wake me up from a dream, but none of them ever did.

He got up and said one line before walking away.

***A FEW UNFORGOTTEN WORDS***

"I didn't come out here to get saved by a 15-year-old."

Bruises radiated my skin, and I felt like bees had stung the entirety of my head. I nudged my head right to see if Viktor or Kurt were watching, but they were still asleep somehow.

Why did I feel so alone in a room of 20 people?

That morning, after the trumpet squawked to wake us up, I became the object of many stares; bunkmate stares, Milo's scowling stare, even Viktor's stare. Viktor's hurt the most of all, for I

must have felt physically similar when I beat him up out of a fit of rage. Of course, he accepted that quite well then. I didn't know how I would accept Milo's fit of rage.

I did my best to ignore the mirror in the bathroom that day, but when I returned to the barracks, I found Kaslow opening the door, trying to get in. The wall-keeper was behind him.

I heard him yelling to the bunkmates when I was approaching. "We're missing a cadet in here!"

The wall-keeper retorted. "He's right behind you, sergeant."

Kaslow laughed like an evil kettle again after looking at me. "Looks like you need a first aid kit."

Kaslow had established his dominance with his actions from the day before. It was as if he wanted to satiate his tendency to oppress AND be productive by getting me a chance to practice my first aid skills on a live patient. He killed two birds with one stone. The ironic thing was, Marleyans stared at him the whole time. Even they must have thought he went too far.

Kaslow gave us our orders for the day after I went back into the barracks. After he left, I heard some whispers from outside. It was between the wall-keeper and him.

The wall-keeper talked like aggravated sand. "Was shooting that cadet yesterday necessary?"

"Since when do you have the authority to question me, Husen...Husenboogerdork?"

"You are wasting resources, Sergeant. These cadets are resources, and they should not be wasted."

"This isn't the tone I was expecting from you...hmmph...I don't even know why you're here. Aren't you supposed to be a wall-soldier opening and closing gates?"

"I used to be in the military. I was brought back for service to fill staffing requirements."

"Be careful speaking to me like this again. Or I might just think your soft for Eldians."

"I hold them in a cage for a living, how can I grow soft for them?"

"Just prove to me that you can't."

Kaslow opened the barracks' door again and led us out for training. The boys stayed quiet as if they didn't know what to say, and Milo kept his stare on me like a mask. The following two weeks were like this as well. Milo healed, and he tripped me constantly during training. The boys had trouble acknowledging my issues, and my mind was chaos on a daily.

It didn't even help that my birthday was the same month.

In the two weeks, we learned marching daily and other basic skills. We hadn't gotten into trenching digging, night operations, route marching, or any of the advanced stuff yet. Ironically, weapons handling was supposed to come later in the three months, but we started so early. That's expected of Kaslow, I guess.

After those two weeks, however, I gave myself an early birthday gift. I rolled up a cigarette and sat outside that night, prepared to cough up a lung again. The only issue was I forgot to light it up using the candle in the barracks. When I was about to run back into the barracks, the wall-keeper showed up.

"Come to my office."

Shit.

We walked to his office, and he motioned me to sit down on a wooden chair. As I mentioned earlier, the wall-keeper was a tree similar to Mr. Kruger. The difference was that Mr. Kruger was a decaying tree losing bark, but the wall-keeper was an ageing oak tree with strong roots.

He pulled out a lighter and lit his own cigarette. He then showed it to me as if to tell me to light my own. I did just that, but it took a few tries before getting the evil stick lit. I raised it to my mouth, no thanks to sore arm muscles from training.

He let out a gulp of smoke, but his metal gaze pushed right through it. "Heinrich, what if I were to tell you that I'm Eldian? Would you look at me differently than you usually do?"

I assumed I was in trouble for something, but I got a hypothetical question instead that came from left field. I wasn't sure what he meant by the look I was giving him, though. He continued, "You used to have a scowl on your face whenever you saw me in the internment zone. You had the same one just now when I showed you my lighter."

I should have said, "I don't know," but even that I couldn't muster. My coughing from the cigarette wasn't helping, so I put it out.

"You haven't answered my question." I looked up at the face; It was like a tablecloth loosely put together and slightly mishappen on the table that was his cheekbones. "If I told you I was Eldian and abused Eldian habitants anyway, people of my own blood, would I be horrible?"

I threw out an answer. "No... you wouldn't be horrible. Y-You would be just like every other Eldian. Eldians hurt each other even though we are all oppressed."

"If you agree with me, why do you look at me with that scowl? I am a superior officer to you."

"You hurt Mr. Kruger, sir."

"Who is that?"

"The homeless man."

"There's many homeless men in section F."

"The one who plays guitar."

"Many of them play guitar."

I had no other idea how to describe him. "The only homeless man I care about." Just looking at the wall-keeper brought back memories of when Viktor kicked him in the balls during the fireworks display. Thanks to many small encounters that didn't mean much, I had a long history with this man. Maybe this time would be different, I thought.

"I have a question for you, sir. Do you like your job?"

The wall-keeper continued. "I ask the questions here. Do you hate Sergeant Kaslow?"

My mouth gave an unnatural reply. "No, sir."

"Why not? He shot a bunkmate and forced you to save him without any experience. He then ridicules you daily."

"He does it because..." Every word came out unnaturally; it was as if my mind was constipated for words. "He's preparing us for the horrors of war."

"That's correct...but he also hates you all. Doesn't it make sense for you to hate him?"

"Yes, it would, sir."

The wall-keeper kept his cigarette in the corner of his lips while getting up. He then turned around and looked out the window to ask his final question. "What if I were to tell you I'm an Eldian Restorationist here to kill Kaslow and every Marleyan I can?"

"I wouldn't believe you, sir."

"Why wouldn't you believe me?"

"With all due respect, I think you're testing me."

He turned around, and the metal gaze landed squarely on me. It made me tighten up. "Hmmph...I guess I was making it too obvious. I need to get better at this."

Usually, after someone says something like that, they would chuckle and break character. But the wall keeper's personality was a thin string; if he used a semblance of humor, it would snap.

"You're dismissed cadet."

"Thank you, sir."

I let out a sigh of relief, and walked to the door before the wall-keeper continued. "...oh...and don't forget to keep your friend's mouth shut. Someone may think he's serious about making others revolt when getting back to the internment zone."

I froze by the doorway, and my hand stuck to the doorknob. The creak of the door was longer and more painfully loud than usual. I left the office knowing that eyes and ears were around us, listening to every move. Why did I feel like I was taken to training camp to be punished instead of awarded for "saving" Reiner?