Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER ONE! losing my religion
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Summer.
From the very moment he could even separate right from wrong, Atlas Cohen had decided that he could not be a good person.
It wasn't that he didn't want to be, quite the opposite actually. Atlas had spent the first sixteen years of his life in the delusion that maybe he could've amounted to something worthwhile.
Back when he still lived in the Springfield QZ, a small part of him believed it to be possible. Maybe he was still holding onto the hope that humanity wasn't lost to the virus entirely. But it seemed no matter what he did, whether it was giving to people less fortunate than him, or taking care of his little brother from the very day he was born, it didn't matter. Atlas couldn't change the world he was born into, or the family he was born into.
With his father being a high rank FEDRA soldier, they had never gotten along. Atlas knew only a cruel person could get that high of power, and the man was everything Atlas didn't want to be.
He had taught the boy pretty young it was kill or be killed in this world, and being a merciless person was the only way to get by. Atlas didn't want to believe it at the time, he couldn't fathom that that was the only way to survive. The first time his father had taken him outside the QZ zone with a gun, he had also decided right then and there he didn't like killing.
Whether it was the thought of it, the action of doing it, or consequences of it, he wanted no part in it. He recalled the thought of taking another living, breathing, beings life had made him feel sick once. His father on the other hand did not share that same dilemma. The man had always wanted his oldest son to follow in his footsteps, become a soldier; a man.
So at the age of ten, he attended the Springfield QZ's military school, where he was trained and taught how to kill. In Atlas' eyes, becoming a soldier seemed like the worst possible outcome for his life.
It's not like he needed it either. Most of the other kids were there as orphans, just working for a roof over their head and a meal before bed. He didn't need either of those things. But it made his father satisfied, so he did it with no complaints, rathering it be him instead of James.
