Die In Sleep {HS}

I - Fate

[Billy ]

The heat of bare flames feet away from my skin giving me the feeling of sweating yet cold blood, and the yelling of other people as if the shootguns heard make them precisely do so. The smell of smoked stars and burned wood, clothes and flesh.

A burned ruined night that is simply fate for these people, while for me is just another one. They were born and raised and lived perhaps in peace for all these long years, only to have it all ending in vain like this.

Simply fate. Father always tended to use those only words whenever I, an innocent kid destined to do nothing but follow around, questioned him, a man who has seen everything and everyone treats him like the commander of fate himself.

I got used to it nevertheless, for it was never even an option to think much and wonder about things differently. The flaming night, I've figured it is significant to give the sky a different color and the flowers different smells every once in a while.

Only never had I feared to get burned myself, and had understood the yelling better than I do in this moment. The way my soul urges me to do the same had me a tear escaping from my eye to immediately evaporate at the heat surrounding me.

Father lays on the ground, two natiave arrows drilling his fat chest across.

"Kid.." he groans with difficulty, understanding he can no longer stand up again. While his men haven't realised him yet and keep combating for territory, money and belongings like he took them here for, I take one slow step after the other through destruction towards him, almost forgetting how much of in the eye of the war we are. At the same time I kneel beside his dying body, he still has the strength to lift one hand to my own head.

I don't think he breaths anymore, by the way his own eyes look at me in the same way I don't understand how this is happening to him. For the first time, I see pure fear in my father.

He always talks about how things are just the way they are, but never what they will be. But wasn't he supposed to know? That, after everything, he would end like all his victims, dying just like this.

His arm eventually falls lifeless back on the ground, but still succeeding in pulling a strand of my hair weakly with it. A gasp leaves my throat at the reminding of what he teached me out of it as a kid. I must run.

It feels weird now that the situation is serious and not just a teaching simulation. That I will really leave him here dead in this place, never to return to his arms after pretending and be told 'Good job' again.

But that's what he told me to do. Perhaps he did it truly knowing this specific moment was going to happen. And it would be for nothing if it isn't what I would do.

As if a sign, the hat he had nearly still in his head, rolls completely out and I watch it balancing slightly, that one asking to not be left there too. I stretch my hand to it carefully wondering about doing the same to his coat and perhaps also boots.

I know how much valuable they are and how much father cared for those belongings. The question is, would he rather be reduced to bone in them, or wouldn't he mind his materialistic daughter of keeping them as a way of keeping him? Would he even notice if I did?

*****

"Not now." I tell Fender, my white and soft brown pied horse, which nudges me with his muzzle as I reach him with the teary distracted eyes of mine he must have sensed, "We need to get out of here.." I reassure, trying to be quick at untying and mounting him.