It was a march we made towards ruin and despair

Part 1

People had always looked at Purpled weird when he had said he considered himself lucky. He stopped mentioning it around the second year of him being a child soldier and never really thought much about luck since then.

Now, as he sits in a muddy trench with blistered and burned fingers putting pressure on his friends mangled leg, he thinks about it again. He thinks about how maybe his luck has finally run out.

And then he hears the footsteps. He hears them and he knows he is not lucky enough for the soldier approaching to not be of the enemy.

He thinks he should be feeling something, anything.

He's going to die.
He's going to die and he only feels numb.

The footsteps stop.

He turns his head and makes eye contact with a girl in Antarctic blue and who's hands are rapped around a new ray rifle, the different pieces of the gun buzzing with energy.

She frowns but doesn't move.

He wonders how pitiful he must look for her to not fear him.

She turns and leaves them alone, probably to die despite her mercy with the way things are going.

His hands are shaking and he can't feel his fingers.
Maybe he has some luck left.
——
Tommy is terrified.
He is more scared then he's ever been and he doesn't know what to do.

The flesh on his leg is bubbled and split from being cooked by a heat grenade, the bottom of it blackened.

He chooses not to look at it.

Instead he stares at Purpled.
The fucker's face is blank as he places a tourniquet on Tommy's leg, the magnetic force quickly working to squeeze his thigh and stop the bleeding.

And then he isn't in the trench anymore.

He's practically being carried by purpled as they race to the nearby wood.
His lungs spasm as he breathes in smoke.

He lifts his head and finds he's sitting.
"Eat."
He turns his head to Purpled who is holding small green pills in his bloody fingers.
He grabs them and proceeds to almost drop them four times before he can shove them in his mouth. He imagines them dissolving in his stomach and spreading whatever it is inside of them that will keep him alive.

He feels like shit.
He is tired.

Purpled, apparently, does not care.
Instead, he pulls Tommy up ( and it burns and he thinks he's dying) and they are back to trekking through the forest.

He wonders if they are going to die.
This isn't the first time he's wondered this.

The first time was when he was eleven and L'manburg was being annexed by the SMP. More recently it was when the drafting age for hybrids in L'manburg was lowered to sixteen.

He'd been immediately stationed in pogtopia, where the only person even near his age was an axolotl  hybrid named after a fucking color. He has always found SMP names stupid. Tommy is obviously superior.

He was barely there for two months before the post was directly attacked and now he is being dragged through the woods with a hunk of charcoal for a leg.

He's tired.
——

Sticks and rocks dig into Purpled's poorly bandaged hands as he heaves into the grass.

They had stopped to re-rap their wounds and slap on the cheap skin grafts that were stuffed in  the bottoms of their pockets.

It was as he was deactivating the tourniquet to semi-properly tend to Tommy's wounds when the blackened flesh below his knee just- sort of crumbled. The meat sliding off as the bone fell apart.

Tommy hasn't stopped screaming.