Original material based on stories and characters by Project Aces. The author claims no for-profit ownership over them.

Thy Enemy As Thyself (Knight)
Chapter 2: The Thunder

5 May 2016
Santo Matteo Penitentiary
121 km. WSW of Mante, Emmeria

"Next up is... #71987: Major Nemanja Dragovic, Air Force. Born in San Salvacion, fluent in 4 languages, assigned to...ooh, this is one of the guys that got deployed to our city, not another of those Gracemeria superstars."

"Yeah, and it says here he's also the guy they found breathing at the Windsor massacre site down there."

"Fucking serious? Oh shit, there's that look in his eyes."

"And he hasn't said a damn word since he left the hospital, let's see...well shit. Special papers are highly recommending placing him in solitary immediately?"

"You serious? Bastard like him deserves life in general population and a cellmate twice his size for all those people. It'll be a lot less expensive than waiting years for a slam-dunk death penalty verdict."

"I'm thinking the same damn thing. Also says the guy's an expat with Eastern Faction all over his record. If the Kajnians and Covanians don't tenderize his plush rump in 24 hours, the native Stovies'll just shank him in the halls for being a foreigner."

"Here, lemme see the papers. Why would they want him in- oh. Never thought I'd see the spooks' paperwork so quickly."

"If I had my way we wouldn't be arguing this crap, eh. But those ESIS spooks flooded my inbox with their special letterhead stock announcing his arrival. They wanna make sure his throat's not gutted with some cellmate's genetic material before they're done with him."

"Must be pretty valuable for a genocidal maniac."

"So's every fucking Stovie with stars on their shoulder. My guess is he's in bed with the junta if this says he was stationed on Moby Dick before the war."

"Okay, solitary it is then. Gives him a good view of his homeland if he can reach the bars. Then we can transfer him to general population once we're sure ESIS is finished wringing his ass out."

"Hopefully they'll leave a little bit of that ass intact for the Kajnians, eh."

"Amen to that. Next up is #71988..."

Nemanja Dragovic
Years Earlier

In Estovakian, Nemanja means "no possessions." In Latin, its short form Nemo means "nobody."

In a way, the name my parents gave me represented their spirit. President Jovanovic opened Estovakia's immigration policy outside of Yuktobania's sphere, granting new opportunities for my parents to work and live abroad.

My father arrived in San Salvacion with only the proverbial clothes on his back and a doctorate, marrying well with another immigrant colleague from the Covanian provinces. Together they had to establish that they were more than just "nobody." I was born out of their prosperity as well. I was the first generation of my family born outside of the "old country," although I had no concept of where that 'old' was.

It would seem ironic that the country I called home for my childhood would experience its greatest prosperity with the threat of imminent apocalypse looming over my cradle, high above the circling charms and toys. That was because the country housed the only working weapon that would shield us from certain doom.

They found their own prosperity though their own work, and I was born into comfort. My earliest, most faded memories are from that house on the quiet cape by Lake Oronell. There were two bedrooms, one for my parents, and one for me, and a yard that was just room enough for a football game or two with my classmates after school.

We lived just outside a small town that provided our needs, where everybody knew everybody and people weren't afraid to say hello to a newcomer as much as a long-time resident.

Just beyond that was the capital, where my parents practiced. I was a latchkey kid from the day I entered primary school, which made it all the more exciting when my parents came home from work, however late. Although they would have their arguments from time to time as any couple would, at least one of them would be there to tuck me in to bed at night.

The fates were good to us too, for a while. The brief conflict that swept Usea after the war in Belka passed by quickly. And when the meteor broke apart, the country activated the cannon to destroy them. It was that cannon that mostly spared us from the fate that befell the country of my ancestry and most of the continent.

Yet even then we knew that the cannon would not be able to stop every single asteroid fragment.

That very night, my family and I gathered in the living room. My parents had finished receiving and sending what they hoped would not be their last requests to their colleagues and our relatives across the world, through physical and electronic mail. We said grace over dinner, with an extra moment of silence to help us realize that this could very well be our last meal. We ate quietly, not wanting to break the ice with despair.

For if this were truly the last hours of our lives, we would spend them together.

After the dishes were put away, my father brought out his guitar and we gathered around the fireplace.

My father played his guitar most nights when he wasn't too tired from his work, often performing nursery rhymes, family-friendly hits from the decades before or folk songs from Estovakia, sometimes even the themes from the Osean or Erusean animated features on television with Salavan overdubs or subtitles.

There were a few songs I memorized so well that I could sing along even in their native languages.

But this night was different. It was special.

It was the first night he played that song.

He told me it was a local ballad, from either here or Sapin, when the country was once its overseas satellite. The kind that people played to lift their spirits in times of deepest despair. The kind that embodied the hope at the bottom of the box of horrors, the light at the end of the tunnel.

I learned to play the harmonica from the moment I could pick it up, and I could not help but join in as he began to strum those solemn chords. I improvised, but every note out of that small metal instrument seemed to blend perfectly with each chord as if I'd known that song all my life.

We could hear distant thunder emanating from the flawless ebony sky, in the distance, but we played on until the song ended.

After they turned the lights out and went to bed, I went to my bedroom window and watched the stars. The stars streaked across brighter than they ever did, carrying dozens upon hundreds of thousands of hopes and wishes and dreams and I hoped and prayed that the stars would not come to claim me with them.

I eventually made my way into my parents' bedroom and climbed into bed between them.

As I slipped into the realm of dreams, our house seemed to be engulfed by a sudden thunderstorm, accompanied by the sound of water washing up against our doorway. The tribulation only lasted a few seconds, but I could not sleep for knowing that the apocalypse was knocking. After the splashing resided, I fell back into the realm of slumber.

The house's frame held strong, creaking and groaning but not budging or bending. The next morning the three of us went immediately to work, cleaning up the puddles it had left in the living room and kitchen with nary a word said to each other.

As soon as the work was done, we embraced in tears.

This was the day we lived.

After breakfast we went outside to find the lake full of boats, not so much for people needing evacuation from other residences around the lake as much as they carried divers looking to chip away the fragments that landed in the lake to sell as lucky charms.

We would all need luck for what followed.

The first image displayed on our television when broadcasts resumed was a massive pillar of dust over Farbanti, in nearby Erusea. Where other large fragments had impacted in the wilderness, or smaller cities or villages that had been evacuated, one such fragment directly hit a nation's capital. Neither slum nor skyscraper had been spared in its impact, helicopters searching increasingly in vain for what few remained.

Only then did we have that suspicion that it really was the beginning of the end.

War had always been something that took place in lands far away, drama played out on television or movies. In real life, the violent acts of desperate men fighting for desperate causes. After the meteors fell, the desperation consumed the daily newscasts as the charity of neighbors was no match for the instinct to survive at whatever cost.

Yet even as the country of my heritage slowly began crumbling in on itself from the asteroids, I found it hard to feel sympathetic, to relate. But Estovakia was on the other side of the world. Erusea was next door, and we were already starting to feel the consequences in the weeks leading up to that day.

Every country was asked to take in refugees regardless of how badly they were affected. Entire convoys of refugees and the Assembly of Nations caretakers transited to and through our town, and the townsfolk tried their best to make their stay as hospitable as possible, however brief. Yet eventually it began to grind on the nerves of the countries where they made their safe haven, and the Eruseans were especially aggrieved having to take in so many.

Anti-immigrant sentiment had been on the rise since the meteors were first discovered, but when locals found themselves in the same refugee camps as their continental neighbors, tensions quickly boiled over.

First the police, then the military were deployed to quell the crisis, but even they did not appreciate having to fire upon their own citizens. Soon even they protested and mutinied against a government that could barely muster the will to keep them in line. This left it to neighbors that were themselves reigning in conflicts of their own, and that was the last straw.

Their rebellion had one power base the others didn't - the unified public of a developed nation. They brought in a new government, one prepared to show the continent that its suffering was not to be exploited. They closed their borders, and mobilized their own citizens. The news echoed the sentiments of another fallen nation that had tried the same folly, but unlike Belka the Eruseans were convinced that this time, they would not suffer the same fate. The Assembly of Nations could not stop them, because they wielded veto power.

Rather than fling themselves upon what the new junta began publicizing as savages, they instead chose to wield their might against the continent. They called it unification, to bring stability upon a continent falling apart. Other commentators and important figures saw it as reestablishing the colonial empire that morphed into half of the FCU before my parents were born.

And to them, to us, it was the imminent end of the peace and prosperity we enjoyed.

They sent in a special forces team to capture the cannon, and used it to bring war upon us. Air supremacy was easy to achieve when they had an anti-aircraft weapon that could span an entire continent. Entire air forces were trapped between the rail gun's blasts and attackers and bombers swooping in for easy kills. The amateur footage broadcast over all the television networks depicted science fiction suddenly becoming reality.

The national army was already in full retreat at the onset, caught between their own gun and the advancing forces.

Yet the cruelest irony was that when the war finally reached our town, it did not arrive with the cacophony of bomb explosions and gunshots, of people screaming in pain.

It arrived with the sound of distant thunder.

Four years after the meteors, on that last day of summer, I had breakfast, kissed my parents goodbye and got on my bicycle. School had been cancelled, but I was asked to get a few more things from the market, the last of the emergency rations and supplies we had stockpiled in the event of a protracted occupation. We had gone through routines of what to say to occupation soldiers, where to run in case of emergencies where we were united or separated.

The sky was immaculately blue that day, with puffy clouds that almost seemed to be punctured like balloons by the contrails being drawn all across the sky.

And I stopped to watch out of curiosity. Fighter planes weaving a dance of death up in the sky, the symphony of aerial acrobatics climaxing with fireworks of oil and metal.

I had been watching for only a for a moment when a gust of wind knocked me off of my bicycle. I yelped as my knees scraped across the gravel before looking upward to see what happened.

The sharp silhouettes of fighter jets streaked and swooped low around the hills, as if daring to see how close they could come to crashing. I clung to the ground, the accompanying gusts of wind threatening to pull me with it as the jets fled back into the sky quicker than they had come out of it.

Then there was another explosion. A fighter circling a wide arc high above was caught off guard by one off the fighters from below. A black smoke trail marked its deathly plunge from the blue, its body burning bright orange and yellow as it plunged to the ground barely a kilometer from whence I came.

Another fighter plane had swooped low to verify its kill. It was probably travelling at hundreds of kilometers an hour, its jet engines just loud enough to rise above the ringing in my ears from the previous one. But as I got up, instinct drove me to follow it until I reached the lakeshore.

I will never forget what I saw.

On its nose was the number 13, emblazoned in the same yellow that covered its underbelly. My mind managed to record it in the few fleeting seconds before it punched upward back into the fray.

Once out of sight though, my attention was drawn to the pillar of smoke that marked the enemy fighter's crash site.

Across the lakeshore, I could spot the burning remains of a small house on the cape.

The same house where my parents lived.

It was twilight out when the local police were cleared to leave their safe zones. They found me curled up and asleep by the side of the road, my eyes swollen and red from realizing that my family now only lived in memories past.

When I woke up in the station later that night, the first thing I noticed were a couple of local officers trying not to notice me in return. But I could tell from the look on their faces that they at least vaguely understood what just happened, and that perhaps something similar was happening to them and their own loved ones elsewhere.

They kept me in an empty office to rest while they looked for any surviving loved ones my parents had. It was difficult contacting even the major cities let alone the capital, as the Eruseans were thorough in cutting off communication from the rest of the world.

The alliance of nations that tried in vain to stand up against the Eruseans fled across the ocean to the islands in the east to regroup. In the Usean capital of Saint Ark, the armies of several nations were making a valiant last stand. Our town, deep in the mainland, fell into deep isolation.

By the time my uncle - my mother's brother - came to pick me up in the taxi he normally used for work, the new order was already assimilating the old. The enemy advance was so rapid that there were barely any signs of fighting. Even I couldn't remember exactly when they occupied the capital.

My uncle had me enrolled in primary before it resumed that year, buying a new set of clothes and school supplies.

The first thing I learned as I started the new grade was how to pledge allegiance to Erusea in Salavan, and how to respond in the respectfully subservient manner when encountering one of the many checkpoints that appeared almost every other city block. MPs now controlled law enforcement, from the checkpoints to arresting dissenters all the way down to the crossing guards that escorted us home from school.

The local gendarme, of course, had quietly been "disappeared" not too long after my uncle picked me up from the station.

Gas and other essentials were rationed to civilians while "order" was restored. APCs, jeeps and tanks quickly became the only traffic on the roads. Internet connections for non-military networks were severed almost immediately, and phone usage was restricted and very heavily monitored. The more ingenious of improvisers were able to secretly tune in to Nordlish-language propaganda from North Point on their satellite dishes, but those also ceased. Perhaps the satellites were destroyed or their frequencies were jammed.

Although the occupation forces operated the 21st century, daily life seemed to regress back to the 19th for everyone else. Horses pulled carts normally pulled by trucks, and when power shut down at regular intervals people began wiring up crystal radios to pick up anything that could ease the monotony of the waking hours.

The tall brick buildings that dominated the antic barri dated back to the days of Esapino rule. But where once they seemed charming and rustic, the occupation transformed the streets into the cold, foreboding bottom of a labyrinthine abyss of brick and mortar. At night, without street lights or window lights to guide anyone, they seemed almost haunted.

I passed much of the few remaining daylight hours scanning the skies from the roof of the old apartment block that I found myself forced to call home.

It was ironic that my preoccupation with finding the "Yellow 13" fighter plane that had changed my life in one fell swoop was somehow more tolerable than watching the transformation of my uncle in a home that was following him in its decay.

Out of gas and out of work, he did naught but to drown his sorrows in drink. What rapport we developed in the month or so before rationing hit had dissolved in his liquor, along with most of whatever savings he had left. By the time the leaves turned red, he was almost unrecognizable as the man who once offered my family free rides whenever they wanted to see the sights.

The night I dodged a flying bottle to the face by the light of a flickering bulb was the night I decided to wander out into the city on my own.

Exploring this abyss at night, wearing one of my uncle's jackets over my daily wear for warmth, it seemed like the city and its old architecture harkened even further back in time than the day. Only the abandoned cars and the occasional passing military patrol betrayed the facade to the reality of the present. And perhaps there was some solace in knowing that criminals would be as afraid to venture out against the military than ordinary civilians.

I was eventually drawn to the lights of a single proprietor open after curfew.

The sound of dozens of people chatting was normally camouflaged in the evening traffic, but this time the white noise also echoed down nearby blocks.

The Sky Kid pub was the only business open at this hour, and for good reason.

The place had become the drinking hole of the occupation troops, although the euphoria of victory and conquest had long since given way to envious grumbles about whatever heroics were going on at a front line that might as well have been halfway across the world The talk of eventually returning home to their own families when Erusean rule was finally established or re-established across the continent, as well as whatever else they were going to do while they were here rendered them bored outside of the bar or their duty.

The ambiance, otherwise, was absent.

By that time I realized that my absence alone would not sober up my uncle. I was quickly convinced the only way to weather the tempests at home was to grant him an offering and hope it would appease him.

And it made so much sense to my mind, which was controlled enough by my grumbling stomach. When it came down to it there, I had nothing to lose. They didn't seem like the type to throw a kid in jail for begging, at least when they weren't sober enough to recognize their own rules.

I fidgeted through my pockets and pulled out my harmonica, which the police recovered almost miraculously preserved from the burnt-out remains of my once-childhood home. It rarely ever left my pocket except when I showered or when the teacher confiscated it for the day.

Keeping it helped me keep those memories alive.

I earned the attention of the table next to them when I blew the tuning note. They were right to assume I was a beggar. There was no other way to put food on the table now.

The first tune that came to mind was a theme from a popular Erusean cartoon, the kind that played in the afternoons after school and dubbed in Salavan audio.

And as I began to play, my mind began to shut out everything else but the tune. I strove not to play a single note out of key, although the sadness that started to wash over me made it increasingly difficult to do so.

I didn't want to become numb to those memories. It would breed complacency and help me forget.

I could feel tears seeping down my eyes as I continued to play the song and I knew it would cause them to take pity on me even if I didn't want them to. Because in those minutes, with every note, everything was all right. The voices and figures of the few soldiers that humorously tried to recite the lyrics to that tune in Erusean were replaced with my parents. They were alive, and we had put away the dishes after dinner and we were singing songs by the fireplace to lull me to sleep before school tomorrow.

Every note kept that memory alive, because it was the only thing I could hold onto in this reality.

There was a girl inside the bar, slightly taller than I was and probably slightly older, serving drinks and hurrying the empty glasses back to the sink where they would sit for little more than a minute after rinsing before they were filled back up again. Most likely the barkeep's daughter.

We were separated by the glass on the window, but for some reason, every blurred glance at her transit across the breadth of the bar with almost clockwork precision helped me find that concentration I needed.

And in those few moments, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

The end of the song brought the end of the dream, the curtain of darkness and depressed soldiers draping over the vision of memories past and beauty present. The song earned their smile, a little clapping, a pat on the head and some change for my trouble before they continued on with their conversation and the next round of drinks.

They put the change in a small pile by the edge of the table, and I slowly cupped it into my hands before shuffling off into the darkness. I tried not to be too conspicuous as I did, fearing that their superior officer might arrest me for stealing. I eventually found my way to a quiet alley a couple of blocks from the bar to count my loot under the moonlight.

My one song had acquired a few Erusean francs in coins and small denomination bills, and letter-coded ration coupons valid for a couple of days.

I could only hope it would appease him enough to help me sleep at night.

When I returned home my uncle greeted me by figuring out that I had been to that bar.

He began by making it clear what he thought about the people that ran the place. It was exactly the kind of sentiment shared by many of our neighbors and other townspeople but expressed only in the privacy of their dwellings for fear of retribution. And he implied that I was just as low for groveling to them.

The way he seemed to know the barkeep and his family so well also implied that he was one of their regulars prior to the occupation.

Without another word I scooped my earnings out of my pocket and placed them on the table in front of him. His vision almost seemed to glaze over as he stared at them for a few seconds of tense, awkward silence.

He suddenly laughed tragically and pulled me in for a hug. He tearfully apologized for throwing the bottle and then told me he would try sobering up for his nephew. It was a lie soaked in the alcohol that tainted breath, but in the absence of any sort of assurances for either of our futures, it was something to hold onto.

He then told me that her name was Alicia, she was a good apple from a bad tree, and that maybe I should say hello to her sometime, a nice little boy like me needed a friend in this town instead of some old drunkard.

In the absence of anything to fulfill the present, it was a start.

To Be Continued...

A/N: And without further ado, we plunge back into the familiar and the unfamiliar. Sorry if it's not as concise as I normally make it, I'm trying to get back in the groove of things.

Oh and my headcanon for San Salvacion is Catalonia.