Makita (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
runmakitarun) wrote2008-03-21 11:53 pm
runmakitarun) wrote2008-03-21 11:53 pm
Entry tags:
The dead are silent
Makita sits in front of the two graves she dug every day. Sometimes it is only for a minute or two, sometimes for hours, but each time she cries.
But life goes on. It must.
She's been working her way in a slowly-widening circle around the site of the battle, scavenging ammunition and food and equipment from the hulking shells of destroyed krawls and the piles of unburied dead. It's a familiar task and one which, despite her grief, Makita takes an odd comfort in.
Pushing herself to her feet, she begins circling west. A krawl platoon had been split off the main column and ambushed out that way, and she was pretty sure that no one had picked over the area yet.
The ten days since the battle had been enough to purge the air of the scents of combat. Smoke had cleared and blood had frozen and the air was crisp and clean. The familiar streets and a task she knows well will allow Makita to forget, for just a while, what she's lost.
She whistles lightly as she makes her way among the abandoned krawls and selects her next target. There's a body halfway out of the hatch, but bracing her feet on the edge of the krawl and heaving solves that problem. After poking her head in to make sure there are no more corpses inside, Makita drops into the vehicle and begins scavenging.
But life goes on. It must.
She's been working her way in a slowly-widening circle around the site of the battle, scavenging ammunition and food and equipment from the hulking shells of destroyed krawls and the piles of unburied dead. It's a familiar task and one which, despite her grief, Makita takes an odd comfort in.
Pushing herself to her feet, she begins circling west. A krawl platoon had been split off the main column and ambushed out that way, and she was pretty sure that no one had picked over the area yet.
The ten days since the battle had been enough to purge the air of the scents of combat. Smoke had cleared and blood had frozen and the air was crisp and clean. The familiar streets and a task she knows well will allow Makita to forget, for just a while, what she's lost.
She whistles lightly as she makes her way among the abandoned krawls and selects her next target. There's a body halfway out of the hatch, but bracing her feet on the edge of the krawl and heaving solves that problem. After poking her head in to make sure there are no more corpses inside, Makita drops into the vehicle and begins scavenging.
no subject
After a minute or so Makita begins to shift, preparing to pull herself the rest of the way out of the pit, but as she swings her leg up something slips from her pocket.
The letter! She promised! With a desperate twisting motion she swings to hang from the rusted pipe by the fingertips of one hand as her other hand swings the sickle's tip into the fluttering piece of paper.
It catches. It holds.
With a deep, almost relieved, breath, Makita swings her legs up to hook around the pipe and then slowly inches her way back to solid ground. Once there she spends thirty seconds just lying in the snow, clutching the letter to her chest and breathing raggedly.
That was too close.
no subject
Maya pauses halfway across the landbridge.
I would have died in Al'Istaan if not for you.
This time, I'm not leaving. And you're not here to save me.
She stares down into the black of the pit, the wind pushing at her, setting her coat to whipping about her legs. She moves a boot near the edge; a shower of pebbles and small rocks slough off and fall down, down, down, until they can't be seen any longer.
Either I find you, or the Gorkas find me first. Either way.
Maya draws her foot back and walks across the bridge. On ordinary ground, her boots crunch in the hardpacked snow, leaving a trail of steady, perfectly even footprints.
I've seen enough (http://joiningyousoon.livejournal.com/3250.html?thread=35250#t35250) of this world.
She walks into the wind and the twisted, skeletal remains of the city, a lone, upright figure in a long coat.
no subject
Makita lets her fingers brush across the pistol in her pocket and her teeth draw back in a predatory snarl. Damn witches. They've taken so much, and now it's time to take some back.
no subject
But he's alive. He's not down at the bottom, a broken wreck like Ilya and Nikola and all the rest. Can't kill old Koba that easy.
"Bastard -- Red witches --" Koba pants, each breath harsh and tearing in the frigid air, as he pulls himself up to the edge of the pit. "Didn't get me!" The words give him strength.
"Not Koba!"
He'll just hold here. Just a minute. Get his breath back, and gather himself for one final push.
"I--"
There's a shadow falling across him.
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He stares down at the survivor and there is a moment where he considers the face of this man who was capable of clinging to a wall while the world fell apart around him in a single 'kast.
He does not feel pity or even empathy. A waste. That's all this is. Another waste of life and limb in a completely pointless, perfunctory epilogue. There is no compassion left in this cold bright war littered with familiar dead.
"I didn't shoot at her," the man pleads. Koba, his name is; Koba, who is dead and doesn't realize it yet. It's important to know the names of the dead. Even when the list becomes too long for them all to be remembered. "I mean - I - I -"
In the end, a person's life is not equal to zero; it always has a value.
It always leaves something behind.
"Mercy!" Koba pleads, finally, too late. "Mercy!"
Kyuzo's eyes do not waver. His finger closes around the hailer's trigger; an explosion of light obscures the man's face but not the sickening sound of what a hailer does to an unarmored man at point blank range.
Kyuzo does not wait to hear Koba fall.
He will remember the name; it is all the mercy the man before him deserved. A hand comes up, toggles a switch: "Guardsman Kyuzo to Sorcery Corps -" a burst of static - "this is Kyuzo, come in, Corps ..." He waits for the affirmative, then continues. "I'm groundside with the Major.
"No - nothing she couldn't handle, yet. But she's heading into a 'Gorka zone.
"Just ready a strike team - hailers - and track my position. Have them standing by to drop in."
He pauses to lift his head and take in the surroundings, the fires burning far away and the empty, merciless bone-white world from which the fires sprung.
"... and tell them to be ready for anything."
The switch toggles off and the wind howls through the empty bomb-broken buildings in the comm channel's wake. Kyuzo listens with his head bowed and continues on into the brightness of Nokgorka's war-wounded heart.