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
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.
no subject
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.