It was the night after the end.
The ground was littered with puddles of blood, with body parts, with forgotten bloodied uniforms, with burnt patches of grass and dented guns.
We laid on the ground next to each other, so close I could feel her heartbeat. Our feet were gently touching in the darkness. Though I was still chilled to the bone, and probably would be for a long while, warmth radiated throughout her body, and I was filled with a fuzzy feeling inside. The stars twinkled and the full moon loomed overhead. She squeezed my hand.
And, for what felt like the first time in a decade, I smiled.
"Never let go," she whispered. I glanced over at her, tearing my eyes away from the stars. Her eyes were bright; alive. You never would have been able to tell what we had just been through.
And just as suddenly, the fuzzy feeling evaporated and the sudden tear of pain returned. I gasped and closed my eyes; it dulled the pain, slightly.
I could feel her eyes on me in the darkness. I could picture the look in her eyes as I laid there, staring off into the distance at things only I could see, lost to the world. It wasn't sympathy. It was sadness. It was love. It was empathy.
A tear escaped from my eye, trickling down my face. Even in the dim light of the moon, she still saw it and wiped it off almost instantly.
"It's okay," she kept whispering, even though I knew it wasn't. It would never be "okay." Never again.
"Every time I try to forget, it just keeps-- it keeps coming back..." My voice is almost unrecognizable through the sobs and my voice cracking.
And then the tears came. I had been holding them up for so long, trying to put them away, trying to be the General I was supposed to be, a rock, but they all came.
I cried.
My heart felt like it had been broken and shattered into a million pieces. I had lost everything. Even my dignity. All over some stupid war.
Tears streamed down my face. The hurt was too big. Too immense. And i realized, in my heart, that it would never really go away. I was stuck like this, in this deep hole I would never dig myself out of.
She murmured things in my ear and hugged me. It was all she could do.
I don't know how long we laid there. It could have been hours, for all I knew. The tears finally slowed, but the hurt wouldn't ever go away, that I knew for sure.
For a few moments, she continued to hug me, though I had stopped crying.
"Tears stream, down your face, when you lose something you cannot replace..." She sang softly, her eyes closed again.
Finally, she laid back out on her back and we stared up at the sky again. My hands were shaking so badly, I could barely control them. I chose to ignore that, my thoughts on the hurt and pain still.
"How did this happen?" I asked weakly, into the empty night. "Why on earth would we ever risk everything, anything that mattered in the whole world to us, just to prove a point?" My voice cracked on the last word and another tear escaped once more.
"Because we have something worth fighting for." She murmured, her face a masked with an impassive expression.
The words hung in the air.
Something worth fighting for...
"But was it worth it?" I asked harshly, my voice louder. "Was it worth it to lose all of this? To lose everything??"
"No," she said softly. "But it's a comforting thought to know that they risked everything for you."
I blinked and let this sink in.
"War is a cruel thing," she continued, "and I never thought I'd be a part of it. But it's the way that we live that demands it, in a way. Sometimes we have no choice in things. Sometimes we're under the upper hand. Sometimes we're the forgotten and the unwanted. And we cry over things we can't change. But in the long run, things will always turn out for the better. And the lower hand will become the upper hand. And the light that you've been dreaming of will appear."
"Where is the light?" I asked, my voice so full of pain I couldn't recognize it.
"You still have to find it. But it's coming, I promise."
I suddenly remember one of the first things she'd ever told me. "I do a lot of things, ______, but I do NOT break promises."
It's still coming... It'll come...
I blinked hard.
Her promise meant more to me than anything in the whole world now.
"Well, we're going to find it." I said suddenly, sitting up. She smiled, still staring at the stars.
"Let's go."
"Where?" She asked absently. "We can't just leave."
"Sure we can!" I practically yelled. "I'm tired of laying around and dreaming. Of dreaming of better days. Of making our escape. Lets just DO it for once. Let's just run."
"That'd be nice..." She smiled at the sky. "But where would we go?"
"Anywhere but here."
She raised her eyebrows.
"Come on, there's GOT to be more than just this little stretch of land. We could go anywhere, ANYWHERE, and start over, forget the past." I grabbed her hands and pulled her up so she was standing with me and pulled her close, closing my eyes. I could feel her smile.
"We could start over," I murmured.
"Then lets go. Tonight."
"Really?!" I pulled back in surprise, studying her face to see if she was being truthful.
"Of course. I would love that so much; you have no idea. We could run and never look back."
My eyes filled with tears as I hugged her tightly.
"We could start over," she repeated, tears streaming down her face again.
She was laughing as we danced across the field, stepping carefully over the piles of blood and decapitated body parts, forgetting everything except the fact that we had finally found it.
We had found each other's light.
