What Only Time Can Know
Prompt: #005 - Son
Gone
-----
The light goes out of Jonesy's eyes, and Mal turns away, crouching down against the sandbag wall, sighing as he lets his head fall back.
Twelve days. Twelve days since the day his world came crashing down and the unthinkable had come calling with hundreds of tall ships bearing colors that he'd sworn to see burn. Twelve days and they were still dying, still fighting a war that had already been lost.
He knows it's just a matter of time. The treaty will be signed, Alliance med ships will arrive, smooth and gleaming, giant war ships close behind, and they'll have no choice but to finally lay down arms or die. They'll go home, and all of this will put down in the pages of history, memory of a victory for those who write it, devoid of individual faces and the individual belief that one has a right to live as one chooses.
They'll go home.
He's guesses he's still got one thing to live for.
Zoë walks from between walls of sandbags, her silhouette backlit, limned in the orange glow of campfire. Frame taut and held together by tension wires, but there's no warning of danger in her gait. In fact, there's a shuffle in her step, a reluctance he's never seen in her, and she hesitates, hovering on the verge of turning away.
"Sir... you need..."
She trails, standing there for a long moment in silence. Across camp, something falls over with a loud clang and a single startled cry rings out.
"What is it, Zoë?"
Her eyes survey him one last time with something he doesn't think he's ever seen in them before, and at last she crouches down beside him, pressing something into his hand. Her palms are slick with sweat, and he can feel her tremble as her skin meets his for a brief instant. Formal thing, cream colored paper, crisp and firmly pressed and all too familiar, and he hates it on sight, hates the feel of it, cool and sterile against his skin.
The letters are printed, neat and precise ink that some bureaucrat dictated beneath dead light in a gray, immaculate room that had never known joy, or laughter, or the true pain of loss. The words it speaks are heartless, vapid as the place they'd been birthed from, and he can scarcely comprehend their message.
We regret to inform you—
"But that... this..." he lets the words drop away, unfinished, not even realizing that he had been speaking.
The letter falls from his hand, hot breeze catching it up and whipping it out across the battlefield. Zoë sits, saying nothing, and now she does look at him. He can feel her eyes burning into him, can smell the thick, metallic scent of blood in the air, taste gritty gunpowder and dust his mouth. He can feel the blood in his veins, the wind across his skin, every ache, every pain, every nerve and sensation standing out in brilliant, singular detail.
Shadow—
We regret to inform you—
A tight starburst of pain contracts and explodes inside his chest, and he lifts his hand to touch it, expecting to feel warm wetness, see blood staining his hands black. But in the firelight his hands are clean, and soldiers shuffle by in brown coats, eating rotten rice and exchanging war stories and none of this is real, it can't be real, because if it were real no one would be walking around eating rice and trading tales and dropping things and—
Zoë shifts and he meets her eyes across the darkness, and that's when he knows, knows for sure. Color drains out of the world and everything inside him turns to ash, hollowed out and empty, devoid of meaning. The pain inside him is an object within an object that rests upon an object that spins, and his relation to it all is forgotten, a puzzle his numb mind cannot begin to piece together. For an instant, everything that ever was and has yet to be has ceased to have meaning, and he forsakes it gladly, lets it all fall away into shapes and colors and sounds that have no context.
Zoë speaks somewhere far beyond him, a faint, melodic noise. But all he can hear, all he can see, all he can imagine and breathe and remember are two syllables that used to mean everything.
He lifts his hand to his chest again, sliding it between brown and red.
Wrinkled yellow paper, folded and creased with months of wear, bearing words from a callused hand that will never write again. His fingers brush against it, a wisp of memory across his bitter heart, crinkled edges worn thin and clear. The words twist like fire in his memory, every letter, every symbol, every curve of flowing script, and he can hear her voice speaking them, clear as the church bells that used to ring out in town.
"Dear Son..."
