Interlude [h.s]

seven

THE REVOLUTION
Three days ago

Elijah is tired of waking up at five in the morning every day for his training. When he signed up to become a soldier, this wasn't what he was expecting.

To be honest, the word soldier seems a bit of a stretch. He supposes it does give some kind of fascination to the job, making it one of the most respected ones in the Revolution, but he cannot guarantee that's the most appropriate definition.

If he had to make up one himself, he'd probably say "being part of one of the groups of twenty or so people that get sent on missions with varying degrees of destructive objectives". It sounds a bit scary like that, but it isn't really. They're never sent openly against the president's army, and the only times they go against the guards, are when the latter are reversely outnumbered. Ezra may be a lot of things, but he isn't an idiot. He isn't sending his people to die.

He didn't tell Alouette he was joining until she found out, but it's just because he didn't want to scare her. He knows the idea people - especially women - have about the army. They think they risk it all, and they truly did, many years ago, under the previous president.

Nine years ago, a terrible war happened between the Revolution and the government. It wasn't fought on open ground though, and not many citizens noticed its existence. But the Revolution remembers the persecutions, the killings. They went on for months. The Revolution's soldiers were sent out to die, to protect what was left of their organisation. The government's army was everywhere, and they seemed to be always a step ahead, they were wherever they were. They lost many valuable men, in that period.

Then it just ended. They didn't win, but they also didn't lose. It just ended, and the Revolution and the official army never seemed to cross paths again. Ever since then, becoming a soldier has become an easy job: you go out, do your thing, and have a reason to go to new places and meet new people. Elijah thinks it's pretty cool. He doesn't want to spend the rest of his life, or how long they'll be forced to hide for, storing the goods other people bring in or in the generator room like his father. That's boring, and he isn't a mole. He'd like to see the sunlight from time to time.

Now, things between the Revolution and the government are becoming tense again, but the president is nowhere close to discovering where they are or discovering the pattern of their actions, so Elijah is sure that job won't get harder anytime soon.

With all due respect to Harry Styles, he's nowhere near as good as his father. He looks lost, compared to him. He's good at threatening people in front of a camera, but at the end of the day all he does is raise the prices of electricity up and up in hopes of making back the money he loses after every incursion of the Revolution.

Elijah guesses that's why you should never aim to rule a country when you're in your early twenties and lived sheltered for most of your life. He's scary, but if you look attentively enough, you can see he's just clueless. Not a match for someone who's been doing that job for over ten years, like Ezra.

Like Alouette's father, bless his poor soul. What an awful way to die, crushed by one of the tubes in the generator room.

It'd been a bit rusty since forever, but nobody had thought it would've broken and fallen down, just like that. If only someone else had been around, he could've been saved. But it was in the middle of the night, and nobody was. Nobody even heard it happen, thanks to the sound insulation of the generator room. It usually allows people to sleep peacefully, but on that day it aided an untimely death.

Nobody even knows what Alouette's father was doing there in the middle of the night.

So he left her alone, barely twenty, to take care of her younger sister, that was only two at the time. It took a toll on her, he knows that, he could see it in her eyes and so could the rest of the Revolution, so they all tried to help her out in the best way they could. That's what they do here, they help each other out, they're here for each other, like one big family. Some of them don't have one at all.