"Negative." Stop, she can't help thinking.
"What about you?" Don't ask that, she wishes to scream.
"No good." Please, she wants to beg, her shoulders shaking as she shuts her eyes tight.
"Honey?" Hell - this must be hell.
"No. What about the kids?" With humanity as the sinners paying for their crimes.
"I don't-" White noise. She has to remind herself, that they must be white noise, she must only view these people like that.
Opening her eyes she stares down at the patch on her arm that was freshly placed. Her clothes are torn and bloodied, torn and poorly mended. The few belongings they share are both strapped to her back. Her dark green pools can not help but glare at the insulting patch: the results still not received. Her crimson hair was in a mess of a braid. Her lips are chapped and bleeding; she can't stop biting them.
"Mima?" The weak cough breaks her out of her sinking sanity. Her attention returned to the reason why she's here, why she still lives, even as their hell continues to grow. Looking down at the burning child in her arms, flushed and struggling to breathe. Pale with sweat on her brow, she feels sick. She shouldn't look like this! Such grass-green eyes, oh but when was the last time she had seen any patch of grass, now misted and unfocused. "Where…?"
"Shh, don't speak, my little rose. Save your strength for Mima okay." She softly coos to the eight-year-old child. No child should look like this. No child should be so close to death from an illness they once treated as a simple seasonal bug. "Your Mima is gonna' get you a doctor real soon, okay? And then you'll be all better in no time okay." Poison, it's suffocating. It's a lie. No, it's not a lie: not if her results come out right, not if… at least one of them proves useful to these beasts in the guise of humans. Her eyes drift to the child's matching patch - it's almost time. 'Please… Please, let us pass. We have to pass. She can't die. I can't do this again. I can't lose her too.'
"Ma'am." The soldier is already moving towards them. She can see the rejected from the corner of her eye from where she sits on these ruins- the anger, the offended, the desperate, the broken. The ones already trying to make demands, to argue their plight or case. They will die if they can't get inside. Few can continue to survive outside the gilded cage that lies before them. These walls… are sadly their only hope.
"Please, my wife is pregnant! You have to let us in!"
"I'm begging you, at least take my children in! Please! Please, at least save my children."
"They need a doctor! Please, he won't make it if we can't get proper help!"
The horrible truth is... they are no more than cattle stepping up for the slaughter.
"Ma'am." She finally turns her tired eyes up to the soldier before them. Their face is set, their emotions ridged behind a mask, but the eyes do not lie. She can still read them even after all these years of only focusing on herself, and the child left in her care. Those eyes still struggle with the horrors of the rules they must enforce. Their eyes can't help but look to the families, to the people who will be turned away, to the dying child in her arms if neither get in. "It's time." Their voice does not let their true feelings escape. As she pulls the patches from her arm, from the childs…
"PLEASE LET US IN!"
"GET BACK! WE WILL SHOOT IF YOU USE FORCE!"
She seals their fate. 'We walk over the grave of others so that we can live…' She thinks. 'Truly, we are but selfish creatures, and that is the sin we continue to pay for.'
"Coming in: Maria Valkyrie, age forty-six, ex-military. A new god eater candidate. With her is her granddaughter, Akiko Amano, age eight. The girl has a high fever, consistent cough, in and out of consciousness, and has tested positive for possible future recruitment as a god eater. Needing immediate medical aid, now."
She does not look back at those to be forgotten as they beg for another chance, another way. She cannot look back, not when the life in her arms carries more value than the very world they live on.
"Mima," Akiko coughs again as she struggles in Maria's arms. Weak and tired, so feverish and sick. She now has a chance to be saved - no, she will be saved. "Wha."
Maria almost winces at the hack that escapes her small form, "What about the others? What about-?" The coughs rake through her once more, and Maria can only soothe her back as the gates close shut. Those inside have yet another chance to live and survive, those left out…
"Promise me, my little rose..." Her arms tighten on her granddaughter's form as she continues forward, her eyes set on the path before them. They cannot turn back. "Promise me...that you will-"
"Akiko Amano." Her green orbs snap open, the shoddy space she stands in holding little furniture that she can't take with her. Her bag held all that she owned, all that she had collected over nine years inside the walls. Slowly, she looked back at her escort: an older man with an arm in a sling and a familiar red armlet, though plastered with a gold bandage - visibly out for all to see. "It's time to go, kiddo. Time to become a God Eater."
The grip on her bags tightens. She takes a shaky breath before finally turning to face her escorts, a smile on her face as she tries to swallow her fears. "Right! Coming gram-! I mean, Mr. Gen!" She grins, seeing the old soldiers shake their heads or turn their gazes away. They think she doesn't know her fate. They see a seventeen-year-old grinning like a fool, to be sacrificed to the violent gods for their security. Just another grave to be dug and marked. She remembers the hazy promise her grandmother had asked of her as she walks out of their small home:
"Promise me...that you will live to be better than the wicked woman your Mima allowed herself to become. Promise me you will fight." Maria whispered. She struggles not to shake, to cry, to rage. How easily could it have been for them to be left out there to rot and die? How easily could it have been to have left them to the horrors?
"'Dum Vita Est, Spes Est.' Where there is life, there is hope. You are the only hope I have left, my sweet, sweet rose."