Unconditional Dominance

A Little Spy

Two Years Later

Dawson's P.O.V.

It was raining. Again.

It was always raining in this godforsaken place. Cold, wet, and constantly pattering against the tents... I had already lost my goddamn mind from the sound of it, the smell of it, the feel of it. Nothing was ever dry; not my clothes, not the ground, or the millions of thick trees that surrounded the camp...

Everything was wet all the fucking time.

Sitting on my cot, in the tent I luckily shared with no one, I held a picture of Katherine. Creases cracked through the image of her beautiful face, and at the corners, the paper started to wrinkle inwards, because even it was susceptible to the wet.

In the photo, Katherine's laughing eyes smiled at me while her yellow hair lifted behind her in a breeze I could almost feel if I closed my eyes and concentrated. I often tried to take myself back to the day I captured the photo. It had been the first day of spring, and it was warm, and the ground was still yellow outside our house. It wouldn't be green for another month or two... But the dead terrain around her complimented her beautiful hair, her beautiful eyes, her beautiful porcelain skin...

If I continued to look at the photo every day, maybe I could freeze time and keep her exactly as she was the day I left nearly two years ago. Not a day passed when I didn't envision the moment I would return to her. I could almost feel her arms around me. And I could almost smell her hair as I buried my face in her warm golden locks.

Lowering the photo, I covered my eyes with one hand.

What a miserable fucker I was.

Standing, I folded the photo and tucked it into a wicker chest beside my cot where I hoped it wouldn't receive any more damage from the wet and humid climate.

Outside, my people prepared for the arrival of the very colonel who put me in this horrid place. His pass-through meant nothing to me unless he was visiting to inform me that the war was over with. Otherwise, he would receive the usual report of activities on my end, and I would receive the usual briefing of where I needed to be next.

We were always moving, tracking down the rebel camps that spread themselves up and down this snake-infested jungle hell. No matter how far we traveled, it all looked the same. Trees and cloudy skies. The same rain, the same smell, the same humid steaming garbage air that smelled of leaves and dirt—fuck I hated it here.

Tents popped up here and there in a small clearing in the tundra of thick shit (trees, so many fucking trees). Someone nailed a reflective board to a tree in the center of it all and that's where all the shaving took place.

Beards didn't exist here, it was just too hot and sticky.

With the colonel arriving, I crossed the clearing to shave the stubble growing fast around my jaw. I didn't recognize the man staring back at me. My hair was dull, almost brown compared to the blond it used to be. My skin was darker, my eyes meaner, and my mouth always turned down in a frown...

I was not the person Katherine knew.

Honestly, without her, I didn't deserve to be anybody. So, I guess who the fuck cared what kind of person I was now. It didn't matter until I returned home. Until then, I wasn't bound to be the same.

Clean-shaven, I turned from the reflective board just as the colonel appeared through a thicket to the right of our camp. In front of him, two men with machetes hacked at the trees and vines and all the additional growth in between. After the Colonel, another twelve soldiers followed behind. Behind them, a horse pulled a cart full of the food that we would need for the next month.