Ranger's Roundhouse

Third JAOS one-shot

               She cried when her father left (although his decision was hardly voluntary, of course). The war needed fighting, the innocent needed defending, and the reliable needed to be paid in full for their service. That night, she poured a trickle — for a trickle was all she held in herself — of worry and selfish grief into a book and stuck it there with pencil-lead.

               -

               When the news of his death came, the trickle became a jagged, screaming wave of words that cut and slashed and tore.

               -

               Then her mother left. For the same reasons — and more, so much more. But her decision was voluntary  and selfish  and she, the girl, took none of it. They parted with cold words and raw hearts, and the weight of it was heavier than she dared to admit.
               She wouldn't look at the book. Words could only accentuate the ugliness of the truth. She danced like a restless ghost between I don't care  (that was a lie) and I'm selfish; I don't deserve the luxury. That was wrong.

               -

               When paper and ink coldly informed her she was the eldest of four orphans, she felt nothing.
               That was a lie.
               Her head wanted to scream. Something in her throat wanted to splinter and sob. Her heart wanted to take that knife on the bench, and —
               She did none of those things. Instead, she took the determination of her father and the broken strength of her mother, and she gripped the anger and the grief and the regret and the grief that surpassed words in the claws of a self-control that would not  falter and would only die with her, and drowned it all, like an unnecessary kitten.

               The thing is, when you kill yourself to grief, you kill yourself to healing. Happiness has no sadness to balance, so it leaves. Light and colour see no reason to stay. The world fades to the colour of empty.

               She became afraid of feeling. She knew she'd gone too far. There was no way to ease the pressure; the slightest weakness would give way to an avalanche that reeked of death and pain.

               -

               When her closest friend enlisted for the death of her parents, she realised something: war is a two-headed parasite. War will not leave until one is head is cut off and stamped out like the life of a moth.
               War had taken her mother — forever — her father — forever — and her friend. Pray to God he returns. War would snatch away her last remnants of sanity, the brothers and sisters she loved — and their small souls, revolving around her, would be snuffed out and forgotten in the rolling tide of darkness.

               She had to go.

               To end the bloodletting she had to feed it.

               But she couldn't.

               Until she gazed into the eyes of a small motherless, fatherless boy — the smallest, the baby — and was hit by the weight of the thousand years of pain residing in his tiny frame.

               She had to go.

               But she couldn't —

               Not the way her mother had.

               Horror and terror and fear and disgust writhed viper-like in her soul, but she would go.

               But first? She would feel.

               -

               She found the notebook again. Found the pen. Wiped the dust of a year from the cover, and gently fingered through the pages of the past.

               And Kay began to w F r E i E t L e.