Chapter Text
I promised myself I’d stop making promises.
Time is running out, and death is staring you in the face.
Coppery breath and steaming flesh, the dying pleas of your comrades, their final farewells surrounding you in a cacophony of chaos—you knew you’d probably die this way, but you’re surprised your end has come upon you so soon. Somehow, amongst the turmoil, you find the opportunity to run an internal monologue.
Can’t believe I promised you I’d survive this ‘til the end…
You know, and always have known, permanence has no place in this world. Nothing lasts, nothing could ever last. Still, despite the knowing, your heart had dared to hope, against all odds, that you could outrun your death.
There’s a blinding pain somewhere in your body, it’s too encompassing to focus on. A piercing monotone rings in your ears and your head swirls as it treads the waters of consciousness. Suddenly you are nine years old again with a grazed knee, your head aching with the effort of holding back more tears as your mother, stern as ever, dabs a ball of cotton soaked in ethanol on the wound, gently plucking little stones and grit from it before covering it with a gauze. The memory, like most from your childhood, is faded. The edges are fuzzy, and the more you try to concentrate on your mother’s face the more of a blur it becomes. What colour were her eyes again? Hazel will have to suffice.
You assemble her features like trying to form a puzzle with pieces that won’t fit together. She probably had a nose like yours, you think her hair was the same colour, maybe a little darker. She always used to wear it up and away from her face before she cut it off, practical and professional, but a couple of stubborn strands would always hang loose. On the rare occasions it would appear, she had a kind smile, that much you remember, and she smelled like disinfectant and kerosene from a distance. Although, in the brief moments she would allow you close, you could often smell the lavender in her hair and the spearmint on her breath. She smells more like the kerosene and disinfectant in your memories, though, and something else. Something acrid and metallic, something like blood.
When she speaks to you in this memory, it’s not her voice that falls from her lips. In fact, it’s not even a woman’s voice.
“Oi,”
Huh…that sounds familiar…
“you’re not finished yet, shithead, keep fighting!”
You want to stay with this effigy of your mother, even if she’s not quite as you remember, just to appreciate her for a little longer if nothing else. But reality beckons. When the fog lifts from your eyes, the pain returns with a vengeance. It feels like someone is kicking you in the head over and over and over again and there’s a sharp stinging in your right knee, and a strange numbness below it. Where are you again?
While you’d rather shut your eyes and stay lying on the grass, you heed the words your mother-who-wasn’t-really-your-mother spoke to you.
“Keep fighting!”
You know that, once you give up, you have truly lost. Heaven knows you’re not fond of losing things. Your whole life has been losing things; memories, friends, family. There’s almost nothing left, except a stupid promise made to an unexpected confidante on a drunken whim that you might actually be able to see this through in one piece. That you would make it out alive.
When you try to stand up, your heart plumets into your chest at the realisation that dream’s already a dud. Below your right knee there’s an emptiness where your lower leg should be, and a whole lot of blood soaking the earth. A laugh bursts out of your mouth, humourless and deranged.
Shit. What now, then?
Death wraps a large hand around your limp body and there’s not much you can do about it. You’ve imagined this moment a hundred times, prepared yourself from the day you dedicated your heart to this fight. The pain you expected, the fear was anticipated, but one thing you forgot to reckon with was the room for regret as one thought pierces through with unwavering clarity in the storm of your mind.
I never told him how I felt.
A gaping maw draws near, and that coppery breath is closer than it’s ever been before. The stench is awful.
Fuck, I never told him how I felt!
natsukashii
adjective 懐かしい (-i inflection, hiragana なつかしい, rōmaji natsukashii)
- nostalgic, reminiscent of good memories, missed, longed for, yearned after
- (archaic) dear, beloved, cherished, sweet
Morning light filters in through the gap in your curtain, swaying in the breath of spring, illuminating the dust dancing in the rays of sun.
The fading memory of a terrible dream lingers in your mind, its clarity paling with each second of wakefulness, leaving little more than an imprint behind. It must’ve been sad, because when you rub the sleep from your eyes, there are tears spilling from them. All you’re left with is a worrisome feeling that there was something you forgot to do, someone you left behind in a terrible world without hope.
There’s no memory of who it was, why they mattered to you. You’re nine years old and all you know is that your mother is making breakfast and the graze on your knee is stinging again.
When your mother calls you down to eat, you’re no longer troubled by your nightmare, any feeling of it now forgotten as the smell of eggs and burnt toast floods your senses. She serves you the least burnt slice, her first sacrifice of the day, and tells you to eat quickly if you want to intercept the scouts march in time on their way to Shiganshina.
The taste of the eggs sours in your mouth as you remember that today the Survey Corps are undertaking an expedition, and amongst the scouts pledging their lives to the advancement of humanity’s understanding of the world, your father will be sat in the centre of it all. A cocktail of dread and pride swirls within at the reminder, your amazement at his bravery eclipsed by the immense worry that fills your small body every time he goes beyond the outermost wall.
For what end? You’re not really sure. You’ve asked your mother, but she can’t give you an answer either. When she agreed to marry him, she didn’t realise he had already pledged his heart to a war she wasn’t interested in. There wasn’t much room left for a wife, for a child. Makes you wonder why he bothered, sometimes.
But, when you stand beside the dusty road bisecting the southern half of the land within Wall Maria, when you feel the ground tremble with the approach of a hundred horses, when you see your father’s usually steady expression falter and a softness enter his eyes as he gazes at what he believes to be the only good things in his world, uttering an apology and a promise he can’t possibly keep, you realise there is so much love there. At least, there was, once.
His presence is fleeting, gone too soon, as he’s swept up in the throng of soldiers and setting course for the gate, sparing a final glance back when he knows he shouldn’t, like some Orphean tragedy waiting to happen. It might be the last time you see his face so you take a moment to try and memorise the colour of his eyes that are fading with the distance.
At his absence, a feeling of longing seeps into your bones and your heart aches in your chest for something, for someone, that you don’t even know.
This is a routine you repeat a handful more times, standing a little taller each year by the side of the road as you see your father off to his death, believing every time you see him it will be the last, hoping that you might be wrong. Still, death comes for him within the next three years.
Perhaps it’s because you know it’s coming, sometimes it feels like you’ve lived every moment at least once before, but it’s difficult to find the will to cry about it. There’s an aching wound on your heart that will never quite heal, that will only reopen with every passing of every friend henceforth, and a lucid sorrow that inhabits your flesh like it’s making a home for itself, like it’s always belonged to you. You hang on to your mother a little tighter, but can’t help to wonder how much time you have before she too is taken from you.
She’s marked for death, you all are. You know this, have known it since you were very small, but it doesn’t make the leaving easier.
It never will.
mono no aware
noun 物の哀れ (uncountable) (mono no aware) ←もののあはれ (mono no afare)
- the pathos of things
- a wistful awareness of the impermanence or transience of things
It was not your mother’s intention to marry as young as she did.
She avoids talking about her life before your father, before you, but sometimes the details slip out after a few glasses of wine, on the days she looks more tired than usual. You know she had aspirations, dreams of her own for a time. Perhaps she envisaged another sort of life, a more comfortable one, where she didn’t have to choose between putting food on the table and buying a thicker coat for the winter. Perhaps she would’ve had time to achieve all the things she pushed to the side when she became a wife, and then a mother.
Instead, she settled for your father, and in his death, she has to tolerate the extension of him that lives in her house.
They met during an uncharacteristically warm summer. She was barely an adult, still studying medicine within the interior and working shifts at the hospital as part of her rotation. He was a fresh scout, naïve in his belief that he was doing something to change the world, and not just cutting his own life unnecessarily shorter for the sake of a longshot at glory.
He’d been injured on an expedition, nearly lost a leg in a foolish attempt to save a comrade that died despite his efforts. He would claim that the moment he laid eyes on your mother, with her soft smile and gentle hands, her soothing voice and the stubborn strand of hair that just would not stay pulled back, he knew there could be no one else. Your mother says that’s a load of bullshit, and that he was cantankerous and disagreeable and the only reason they spent as much time together as they did was because nobody else wanted to treat him.
Still, there must have been something there, something akin to affection, because shortly after he recovered, he asked her to marry him and she agreed with only a slight hesitation.
Perhaps it was because nobody had ever asked her before, and part of her worried she might not get the opportunity again. Perhaps it was because she knew her parents, descendants of a family of minor nobility, would object to the match, and she was at a stage in life where little pleased her more than displeasing them.
Either way, eventually one thing became obvious: she had fallen in love with the idea of the life they could live together more than the life they built.
Her studies were abandoned, her home left to the past, everything and everyone she had known now separated by hundreds of miles and huge stone walls as they bought a tiny house on the outskirts of Wall Maria, the only place they could afford on a scout’s meagre salary.
“I hate this house,” she often says when a foul mood descends on her. “I’ve always hated this house.”
The money was enough to get by initially. They scrimped and saved where they could, but it wasn’t the most uncomfortable life she could’ve imagined. In those early days, your father spent more time at home, with her, because even if all their life ever amounted to was analogous to treading water, at least they were doing it together.
Then at some point, you came along, and the water started to rise.
Memories of the early years are hazy, like most kid’s early memories are, but you think you grew up in a relatively happy house with a mother and a father who seemed to love you. They did all the things caring parents should do; they fed you, dressed you, cleaned you. They got you a present on your birthday and sometimes a cake as well. But at some point, it stopped being them, and the presence of your father faded from your life more and more with each passing year.
He returned to the Survey Corps and rarely came home for any length of time. On the few occasions he did, these occurrences are marred by raised voices splintering through the floorboards from downstairs while you tried to sleep, tears in your mother’s eyes and fury on her face. Despondency from your father, who couldn’t figure out what went wrong.
At some point home stopped being happy, as well as everyone in it.
And when your father dies, perishing beyond the wall so far from the home he had helped condemn to this latent misery, he takes any last shred of happiness with him.
saudade
noun f (plural saudades)
- wistfulness, melancholy, nostalgia, longing
- the feeling of missing something or someone
The funeral is a sordid affair.
You don’t know half of the people at the wake, nor do you particularly care to. Part of you is angry, angrier than you thought you’d be, because with your father gone there is no one around to assuage your mother’s temper, of which you are often on the receiving end.
She won’t meet your eye at the wake. She barely looked at you during the service. Not that it was much of a funeral, there was hardly a body to bury. Naturally it had been closed casket. You think you remind her too much of your father, for better or worse, and maybe she’s angry at him too and can’t reckon with it either.
It doesn’t take long for you to tire of the gathering, and since no one is paying particular attention, you slip out the door unnoticed to escape the suffocating air of mourning. It follows you outside, anyway, as you rest your back against the stone wall and slide down to the floor, idly plucking strands of grass that have broken through the pavement in a desperate attempt to reach some sun. The mourning lives within you now, it always will. There’s little you can do to escape it, and your life henceforth will be marred by the rot.
Crouched on the ground, you feel the warmth of sun-kissed cobbles on your bare feet, listen to sounds of idle village chatter pass you by, smell the soft vibrance of a waning summer in the air. You’re better off out here, apart from the gathering. Out of the way. Besides, it’s not as if anyone will miss you. Adults rarely know how to talk to kids, even less so when they’re trying to offer comfort when a parent has passed away. It was downright painful having to stand stiffly and acknowledge vague commiserations mumbled from the reluctant mouths of people you didn’t know, and will probably never see again, and you’re not in a hurry to face more.
Sighing, you push yourself off the ground and decide to walk around for a little bit. The freshness of outdoors is miles better than the air of grief inside the house, and you’re in no hurry to return.
Languidly you turn a corner, stopping shyly in your tracks at the sight of four strangers stood in a small circle in the alleyway beside your house. They’re scouts, the Wings of Freedom emblazoned on their uniforms, a single cigarette being passed around amongst tepid chatter. You don’t recognise any of them, don’t know who they were to your father, whether they even knew him that well or whether they’re just trying to score a day off from work to attend the funeral of a man they were tangentially connected to.
There’s a whisper of tension in the air as one of them, a woman perhaps in her early twenties, notices you and awkwardly clears her throat, stilling the conversation immediately with an unsubtle nod of her head towards you.
“We have a visitor,” she says blandly, taking a drag of the cigarette.
You watch the smoke billow from her lips, following its path to the curious eyes of the man stood beside her. He’s probably of the same age, maybe a little younger. His expression is stalwart but his eyes hold a hint of tenderness, of understanding, and of something else, something unnatural that pulls you in for a moment, that rattles loose unwanted visions of death and suffering and pain, but also an overwhelming feeling of purpose. Some unuttered call to arms, a siren’s song of war.
It's too much. You tear your gaze away from the scouts and shuffle back round the front of the house, out of sight, trying to figure out why your heart hurts as if it were broken into a million pieces.
You’ve only just caught your breath when the group appears, each one filing past you with a stiff nod of acknowledgement as they return to the dismal party inside.
All except one.
He speaks your name like a command, and it urges you to look at him without hesitation.
“I’m Sergeant Erwin Smith. Your father was my Squad Leader.”
He extends his hand, and you look at it almost suspiciously for a beat before fishing yours from behind your back and shaking it stiffly.
He doesn’t add anything else for a moment, and you’re not sure what you’re expected to say, so you speak the first thing that comes into your mind.
“Aren’t you kinda young to be a Sergeant?”
One of his thick, blond brows quirks upwards at your question and you inwardly cringe, expecting that you’ve offended him. A small, ephemeral smile graces his lips, as if humoured by your directness, before his face hosts a tacit sternness again.
“Hm, it was a recent promotion.”
The implication, which you pick up on without much issue, is that the deaths from the latest expedition opened up a lot of senior positions, your father’s included. You look down and kick a stone, listening to it clatter across the cobbles.
“Oh.”
Erwin regards you for a moment, letting the silence hang just to the point of becoming uncomfortable, before speaking up again.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says quietly, earnestly. “Your father was a good man.”
You scoff a little at the statement, finding it funny how this complete stranger probably knew your own father better than you did. You don’t voice this thought.
It’s clear Erwin doesn’t know what else to say, and at no sign of help from you he sighs and steps to take his leave. You watch his back as he heads towards the door, eyes fixed on the emblem adorning his back, when he turns his head to look at you again.
“If you ever have need of it, you’ll always have a friend in the Survey Corps.”
He doesn’t wait for an answer before dipping inside.
You watch the empty space he just occupied for a few moments, mulling his words over. Kind of him to extend the olive branch, you suppose, but you don’t think you have use for some sort of death-induced military alignment right now.
Weird that he knew your name, though. Means your father must’ve spoken about you at some point, so he hadn’t entirely forgotten about your existence when he wasn’t at home.
After a while spent pondering, you notice the gathering begin to dissipate. Guests start filing out of the door, lingering to say their goodbyes and offer their final condolences, while you stay tactically out of sight to avoid having to talk to any of them. Once the last of the visitors turns their back to walk into the setting sun, you duck inside, shutting the door softly behind you.
Your mother is already starting to clear up when you enter, and silently you begin to gather cups and glasses, stacking them next to the sink like the diligent child you are. You each work in tandem, splitting tasks methodically, running on autopilot as you tidy your house and evict the final remnants of the funeral.
As you dry the glasses and return them to their shelves, you glance at your mother with her hands in the sink, staring absently into her reflection disturbed by the ripples in the water. She’s quiet for a while, thinking on something you’re not keen to ask after, before she shakes her head slightly and continues washing the cups.
“Can I ask you something?”
Your voice finally breaks the quiet, and your mother hums in acknowledgement without looking at you.
“What is it?” she asks, placing another cup on the side.
“What’s the point of the scouts?”
She turns to look at you then with a small frown, not of disdain, but of confusion.
“How do you mean?”
“Like…what have they actually done? It seems they all just go out there to die…” you add, reaching up to place a cup on the top shelf, just slightly beyond your reach.
“Don’t be callous,” she chides with a sigh, but evidently doesn’t disagree with your sentiment. “Honestly, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m not sure if they’re incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, perhaps it’s the same thing.”
You mull her answer over as you absent-mindedly dry the bottom of a mug, watching your warped reflection in the sparkling glassware before you.
The swish of the water stops for a moment, and you see a tiny mirror image of your mother with her soap-laden hands resting on the edge of the sink, rolled up sleeves damp anyway, gaze fixed on you. She wants to say something, you can tell. You pretend not to notice, and carry on drying the mug that long stopped being wet.
“Why d’you ask about the scouts?” she relinquishes eventually, slight worry weaved into her brow.
You shrug and put the mug in the bottom of the cupboard, amongst its friends.
“Dunno, just curious,” you offer, not untrue. Doesn’t satisfy her, though.
She nibbles on her lip as she turns her gaze back to the dishwater, contemplating something before reaching in a hand and pulling the plug.
“Did you meet any of the scouts here today?” she asks, pulling a fresh tea towel from beneath the sink to dry her hands.
You turn to face her, nothing left to put away to busy yourself with, leaving you looking a little lost and pathetic as you stand empty handed and idle.
“Just the tall blond one.”
She pauses for a second, wracks her brain for something (his name, perhaps?) and a look of recognition and slight disapproval settles across her features.
“Erwin Smith,” she states, though you don’t sense she’s looking for a response. You stay quiet as she mops any spills from the side. “What did he say to you?”
“Not much. Said he was sorry about dad, that he thought he was a good man, and…”
Something stops the words on your tongue. Halts them in their tracks, evaporating into your soft palate. You sense you shouldn’t mention the thing he said about having a friend in the scouts. You get the feeling it would make your mother angry for some reason, and she has enough excuses to be irate as it is. Best not add another.
“And…?” she probes, pausing her buffing of the counter to glance at you.
“Nothing,” you mutter, shaking your head and gazing out the window to avoid her piercing eyes. “That was it.”
She doesn’t seem convinced, but evidently decides it’s not worth pursuing because she just shakes her head with a weary sigh and stands up straight, folding the tea towel neatly into quarters.
“It’s getting late,” she observes, laying the tea towel on the side and reaching over the sink to draw the tattered curtains that don’t make a tangible difference to the level of light streaming through the small window. “You should get on to bed. I need you up early tomorrow to help me with my patient visits.”
“…Okay. Goodnight.”
You acquiesce to her, because resisting will serve no fruitful purpose. Would just add another brick to the growing wall of indifference between you both.
“Goodnight,” she responds, turning her back to you to resume polishing the spotless counter.
A more tender parent would walk you up the stairs. Stand watchful as you brush your teeth, lay out clean pyjamas, tuck you in and perch beside you on the bed. Talk low and soft, maybe tell you a story or two as you slip into dreams. Maybe, once your eyes are closed, they’d smile fondly and lean across, smoothing the hair from your forehead, press a kiss to your temple. Creep out the door, leaving it ajar in case you have need of them in the night. Struggle to tear themselves away from your side.
Not your mother, though. Not anymore.
почему́чка
noun (listopad) m inan (genitive листопада)
- a person, often a child, who asks a lot of questions
When money’s tight and your mother’s feeling particularly disagreeable, you have to get creative with your financial endeavours.
It started earnestly, picking up some odd jobs around the town—repairing a broken roof, minding someone’s horse while they were away, taking a shift at the tavern that eventually stopped letting you behind the bar as the ale mysteriously started to disappear whenever you were working. The shrapnel of pocket money you acquire from these jobs would almost always be donated to the unofficial family fund, casually relinquished to your mother to do as she pleased with or spent on household necessities. Very occasionally, you put a sliver aside for yourself, but mostly your earnings go to repaying your mother for the cost of raising and caring for you.
It tides you over between your mother’s patient visits, for the most part. Helps you to scrape by, as long as she can keep working and bring in a reliable stream of money, your short stints of menial work help see you through a couple of harsh winters.
But then a sickness from Shiganshina spreads northwards from the gate, infecting the city and slowly crawling around the nearby towns. Everyone in the village looks to your mother for the answer, brings their sick relatives to your door and demands she cure them, but your mother has never seen a sickness like this before, doesn’t have the means to fix it. And the endless stream of the sick brings the illness straight to you.
You don’t remember much between the bouts of lucidity. It feels like you’re on fire from within, your head pounding endlessly, stuck in a vivid dreamscape interwoven with shreds of reality as you linger between wakefulness and sleep, between life and death. You think maybe you see your mother cry once, during this time—hunched over in a chair at your bedside, damp rag used in a vain attempt to bring down your fever now limp in hand, her mouth covered with a thin cloth muffling the sound of her sobs. You wonder whether she’s crying out of love for you, or out of fear of getting by once you’re gone. You decide to never assume either way, and pretend this is all part of the lucid dream the sickness brought on.
Then one day, it’s over. You get out of bed, skin no longer hot to the touch, feeling a little worse for wear, but very much alive. Your limbs unsteady as you take your first tentative steps in over a week, throat dry and eyes a bit more sensitive to the light than usual, but you’re awake and with the living and thankful for it.
Downstairs, your mother sits at the table with her hand in her hair and an array of loose sheets of paper before her. She looks up at the creak of your footsteps on the stairs, gives you a once over, assessing your state, and then looks away with a sigh.
“…I’ve lost all my patients,” is all she says after a beat. “They’ve gone to the doctor from Shiganshina that came up with the cure.”
You don’t know what to say, and your voice is hoarse from disuse, so you just silently go to the sink to grab a cup of water and head back to bed for a bit. You know what she means; you’re financially done for, and perhaps her only hopes now rest with you.
Hence your current predicament—caught red-handed fishing in the back pocket of someone you had expected to have more money than sense. Evidently, this was an incorrect judgement.
“Hey, just what do you think you’re doing?!” The man, probably in his late forties and very displeasing to look at closely, grabs your wrist in a vice and yanks your arm up at an awkward angle, as if putting your thieving hand on display. Not that there’s anything in it, his pockets disappointingly emptier than yours, but it doesn’t matter. The guilt is evident in the snarl on your face as you struggle against his grip, digging your nails into the flesh of his arm to get him to let go which drags a string of profanities from his mouth and earns you a curled fist to the face.
You stumble back, feeling blood erupt from your lip and watching it drip on the cobblestones as your head spins, regaining your balance just in time for a second punch to connect with your eye socket and send you careening to the floor. Your aggressor mutters something about scummy street kids, and gives you a kick in the gut for good measure, leaving you groaning and doubled over, before walking away.
Allowing yourself a few seconds to wallow in the pain, you roll onto your back with a sigh and open your hand to reveal your quarry: a fancy wristwatch that you hope he won’t miss anytime soon, another stolen good that, once sold on, will see you and your mother through the worst of the coming winter.
It’s not much, and it’s not honest work, but you’ve seemingly run out of other options. Your mother hates it, but you’re too old and inherently insubordinate for her to do anything about it. Besides, though she grumbles about it, she’ll still take the money from your hands, even if it’s earned with bruises and blood.
Peeling yourself from the floor you dust down your front and pocket the watch, glancing around for any onlookers. It’s late in the day, and you’re in a quiet outskirt of a town some miles away from your home, and thankfully you’re alone. If anyone heard your scuffle, no one cares to check on what occurred, and you’re grateful. It would be bad if your face became known around here for petty theft, wouldn’t be great for future business.
Wiping the remnants of blood from your split lip, you put the sun on your right shoulder and begin the long journey home. It’ll be the dead of night by the time you arrive, your mother will be long asleep in bed, so at least there will be no questions to reckon with tonight about your black eye and bloodied mouth. You’ll get to the house, slip in quietly through the front door, head up to your room, stow the watch and your other finds of the day, and collapse on your bed in time to get a couple hours of sleep before the morning comes. Then, once you’ve sold all of your borrowed goods, you’ll go out and do the whole thing again.
You sigh inwardly at the thought.
This week a split lip, maybe a fractured orbital. Last time it was a broken nose. You know you shouldn’t keep doing this, but you don’t know what else there is. What other path your life could take.
What do you have to offer the world? Not much, except a head full of redundant medical knowledge inherited from being your mother’s unpaid intern all your life, a sharp and disagreeable tongue that asks too many questions, a penchant for getting yourself into more trouble than you can get out of.
This, you realise, might be all that you’re good for.
You’re at the edge of town when you spot it. A loose flyer, tumbling across the track in the evening breeze, making a beeline for you. It smacks into the bottom of your legs, adhered there by the wind, before you reach down to peel it off and read the message the road has brought to you.
FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY!
ENLIST TODAY FOR PRIDE, GLORY, AND A REGULAR PAYCHECK!
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN FOR THE 98TH SOUTHERN DIVISION TRAINING CORPS.
You huff a stunted laugh, shaking your head free of the thought. You decided a long time ago the military was a dead end. Nothing good came of being a soldier, unless maybe you were lucky enough to weasel your way into the Military Police where you could sequester yourself in the abundance of the interior, pretend like you belonged there, do the bidding of those that actually did. Otherwise, you’d just end up relegated to the Garrison, or worse, the Scouts.
Stupid plan.
You swore off ever entertaining the idea of becoming a soldier the day your father died. Swore you wouldn’t follow his path, walk yourself into an early death.
…Stupid.
Quietly, you fold up the flyer, tuck it safely in your pocket, and head home.
komorebi
noun 木漏れ日 (hiragana こもれび, rōmaji komorebi)
- sunlight filtering through trees
“So, what now?”
The weather is warm, sunlight of the late afternoon scattered through the green of the trees above as you and your two best friends lounge in their shade, worries forgotten in the bliss of the waning day.
Theo Mandl, the eldest, rolls over onto his belly and looks up at you, your back resting against the bark of the old linden tree, arms folded behind your head, face craned up towards the light. He picks at some tufts of grass as he thinks, humming a little tune, his chestnut hair caressed by the breeze. A few bracts from the tree fall into it, becoming entangled in the strands.
“Thought we could go to the tavern again,” Theo says, glancing south towards Wall Maria as he picks at some more grass, eyes narrowed in the sun. “There’s a new barmaid and I think she has a thing for me.”
By the stream, Maja Bernauer stops what she’s doing to pull a face at him.
“Is she blind?”
You laugh as Theo’s expression shifts between a mix of feigned hurt and genuine exasperation; his face contorted into a weak glare towards his provoker.
“Har-har, good one. I was gonna get you a real drink, but you can enjoy a lukewarm glass of milk instead,” he says, blindly searching for the bracts in his hair which have started to tickle his scalp.
“Fine, I’ll just drink yours when you’re not looking.”
You smile easily, half-lidded eyes watching Maja, the youngest of you three, as she returns to wading through the shallow edge of the stream, her trousers rolled up above her knees, watching the fish and other river inhabitants in their natural habitat. She returns to shore to note down something, some new creature she’s found, just as the rippling sound of the soft waves is lulling you into a light doze.
Theo nudges your leg to wake you, eyes questioning as he twirls a daisy between his nimble fingers.
“So? Tavern?”
“Sure,” you say with a stretch, rubbing the sleep from your eyes as you glance towards your young naturalist friend. “Ready, Maja?”
“Yep, one sec…” she answers, rolling down her trousers and wiping her feet on the grass before slipping her shoes back on. She picks up her notebook and snaps it shut, joining you and Theo as you start the walk back to your town.
Leaving behind the linden tree and the narrow stream, you hop the fences for grazing animals to approach the main river, keeping pace with a boat bound for Trost for a few minutes until it presses on out of sight. Beside the river, commercial fishermen have set up modest nets, keen eyes watching the water for signs of movement. Further up, hobbyists relax with their rods close by, a flask of something hot beside them as they wait for the fish to take the bait. The water is crystal clear, the sunlight bouncing off of its ever-shifting surface in dazzling rays that make you shield your eyes a few times and eventually look away.
In the west, far in the distance, large mountains with snow-tipped peaks rise from the landscape, shadowing the forest beneath. Nearby, farmers rest from the harsh midday sun, their tools left leaning against barns and sheds as they recline in the afternoon heat, straw hats covering their faces, shielding tender cheeks from burning.
In front of you, your town quickly comes into view. Theo and Maja bicker endlessly about something you haven’t been paying attention to, but you smile at the familiar sound as you cross the bridge to the other side of town where the tavern lies.
Upon arrival, Theo instructs you and Maja to find a table outside while he goes in to get the drinks. Even if Maja’s on the cusp of sixteen, she suffers from severe baby-faced syndrome, and looks far too young to be drinking anything stronger than a heavily stewed tea. No chance the bartender will serve her, so no point in trying.
The two of you chat idly as you wait for Theo to appear again, and when he does it’s with one pint of ale and a glass of milk. Maja sighs and you frown at him.
“Sorry, he would only give me one,” he explains, placing the drinks down. Maja gives her milk a filthy look before taking a sip. “We’ll just have to share.”
The three of you take it in turns to sip the ale, supposing it’s better than nothing. Once or twice, the barmaid Theo mentioned glances over, catching his eyes and smiling shyly. You and Maja share a glance, rolling your eyes as Theo loses his train of thought, eyes following her pathway back indoors. A soft sigh leaves his lips once she’s out of sight.
You’ve known Theo for as long as you can remember. He’s been a constant in your life, his presence as ceaseless as the rising of the sun each morning and the setting of it each evening. After your father died, you started to spend more time with him when you had the chance; whether it was working jobs together, skipping stones on the river, or taking a couple hoses from the yard and riding out to the nearby wood, whiling away the afternoons laying in a field of flowers, picking wild berries and watching birds.
Maja arrived a few years ago. Her father fell ill, and you and your mother would visit most days to nurse him back to health. It was just the two of them in the little house by the river, and she had been taking care of him all by herself before someone called for a doctor. When he got better, you kept going to visit, and soon she was joining you and Theo on your excursions to the wood or the stream by the linden tree, or your trips to Shiganshina to find something else to do.
You love them both dearly as if they were your family.
Which is why what you’re about to tell them makes a lump metastasize in your throat.
“I need to tell you both something,” you broach, waiting for a natural lull in the conversation they were having about what they had for dinner last night.
They turn their collective gaze toward you warily, unsettled by the severity in your tone.
“…Yeah?” Theo prompts, shuffling in his seat.
Swallowing down the nausea steadily rising, you glance between them before looking down at the table.
“I’ve enlisted in the 98th Southern Division Training Corps. I leave next week.”
Your words are met with nothing, at first. An uneasy silence answers you, and after a few seconds you brave a peek at your best friends and cringe internally at the sight. Maja’s mouth is hanging open, moving uselessly as she tries to find the words to respond to your admission. Theo’s expression morphs from a similar state of shock to a tight frown, brows knitted close together and grip tightening around his mug.
“…Please say something,” you beg, leaning further across the table, trying to bridge the gap between you.
Theo deflates with a sigh, averting his gaze and picking at a spot of rotten wood.
“I know.” His voice is flat, even, dejected, almost. Like he had known, but didn’t want to believe it. Had been trying to ignore it for a while.
You frown and look at him, confused.
“You knew?”
“Yep,” he breathes, taking a sip of beer. “Saw the letter in your room a couple weeks back. So…I signed myself up as well.”
A boulder laden with dread drops suddenly into your stomach. Now, it’s your turn to stare in shock. Maja can’t keep up, switching her gaze between the two of you while she catches on to the realisation that the two people she loves most in the world are leaving her in a matter of days.
“Well, thanks for telling me, guys!” she laments, now a little irked at the situation unfolding in front of her. “You’re not both leaving me here, I’m coming too. I’m gonna go and put my name down right now!”
She moves to stand, nearly knocking her half-drunk milk in the process, but Theo shakes his head and pulls her back down into her seat by the edge of her shirt.
“No, you won’t. Registration closed last week, that’s why she’s only telling us now—so we can’t enlist as well.” Theo looks back at you as you chew on your lip. “That right?”
Hanging your head slightly you nod with a short sigh.
“Yeah. That was the idea…”
It felt subversive, cheap, almost, sending off that registration form quietly, sitting on the knowledge you were actually leaving your home town for good once you got that reply. Deciding how to break the news to your friends. You have no idea how you’ll tell your mother, though you doubt she’ll care too deeply.
“But…why?” Maja asks softly, ocean eyes looking like they could spill over any moment.
You go weak at the sight, feeling like you’re kicking a puppy with the way she looks at you.
“I need the money.”
It’s all the explanation you can offer, it’s all there is to it—you’re poor.
“Don’t we all?” Theo retorts, sipping his beer and not looking at you.
You look at him for a bit, small frown on your face, deciding what to say to that.
“That’s not fair,” you say, taking the beer from him once he’s put it down. “You still have both your parents, and they both have jobs.”
He sighs, relinquishing the argument, realising you are, actually, right.
“Sorry. I just…isn’t there something else? Anything else?”
The beer tastes warm and unpleasant in your mouth, having been cradled by Theo’s hand for too long. You take another sip anyway.
“I’m tired of stealing and guessing when the next job’s coming along,” you explain, looking down at the table and tapping a nervous rhythm against the mug. “It won’t be much, but this way I’ll get an actual pay check every month, I’ll have free board and free food, and I can send the money back home to take care of mum. You’re telling me you wouldn’t do the same?”
Theo sighs again, deeply, bobbing his head in vague agreement.
“Well…guess I am,” he points out, taking the beer back from you and avoiding your gaze as a grim expression settles across your face.
“You don’t have to do that,” you say, staring at the side of his face while Maja stares at her milk.
Theo shrugs, finally turning to look back at you.
“I know.” He pauses and, for a moment, you feel your heart wither as you expect him to redact his application, to abandon this endeavour entirely, and although the thought of him becoming a solider, putting himself in harm’s way, scares the shit out of you, a small part secretly hopes he’ll never leave your side. “But someone’s gotta keep you out of trouble, right?”
The look you give him is laden with relief and gratitude and affection and all the things your ineloquent vocabulary can’t say. You settle on the only response you can think of, murmuring a sincere, “Thank you,” and try not to think about everything that could possibly go wrong.
Theo doesn’t seem perturbed. He just fixes you with one of those lop-sided smiles that everyone finds charming, as if to say, ‘but of course, you idiot’. Guess you shouldn’t have expected anything less from him, after all you’ve been through together. Silly, really, to think you could hide this from him, run away without him, tread a path that would force you apart. He always has a way of finding you, whether you want to be found or not. Honing in like a compass, calibrated to something uniquely you, unable and unwilling to escape your orbit.
Your mother always did say that boy would follow you to the ends of the earth. Soul entwined with yours, bound together by fate and love, so much love.
Together for eternity, 'til death does you part.