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Wrath.
Sing, oh goddess, of the wrath of Peleus' son Achilles; murderous, doomed, who cost the Achaeans countless lives, hurling down to the house of Hades. So many sturdy souls.
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Legundo, try as he might, is not a peaceful man.
He is not a kind man.
And he is not a worthy man.
Years he had spent as the commanding officer of a battalion that had never deserved to suffer his cruelty, blind to the worth of their lives beyond the violence they might offer at his feet. It was he who had ordered that they continue to fight even as they bled before him. It was he who had ordered that they poison the water supply of a town filled with nought but rural families and non-combatants. And so it had to be asked; what was it that he was fighting for? What was it that he laid to ruin his humanity for? There was no one waiting for him when the fight was over. No victory that would satiate him. No justification.
It was only bloodshed that he sought — the symphony of war, sung by the clash of metal and the ringing cry of gunfire. One that all but he knew for the calamity it was at its core. A man-made disaster caused by the hands that should've cradled, and the minds that should've seen reason. He became a doctor in some ill fitted attempt to see his own redemption in the shape of his vague future, as though it could absolve him of his sins when the call haunted him with a clarity still. He is no better now than he was then, and no more deserving of sweet salvation than the man who would send tens of hundreds to their deaths with pleasure.
For there is a part of him that still sees the individuals around him as a unit.
As soldiers under his command.
And what a lousy battalion they would make, the call hums — thoughts flashing through his mind as if he were drunk and purring temptations of the greatness he once sought. He could make them better. He could bring Apo's substandard military technique to excellence. He could teach Martyn to push through the pain of his injury. He could train Avid into silence. And what a horrid call it was, in the echoes of the one he had never wanted to be again but found himself falling back into the arms of the longer he stayed in Oakhurst. His hands itching for a blade to call his very own just as everyone else did.
Insanity was what it made of him.
Madness, he insisted, when he swore that he could see his regrets not lingering at the edges of his mind but in the mortal shadow of the town; Abolish, he called himself.
Absurdity, Legundo begged, when his eyes would instinctively trace the flutter of the young man's hands as they handled even the mundane as though they were but makeshift weapons. The way the weight of his stance would even into something defensible when he was made to stand still for just a moment too long. The ease in his expression as he eagerly slot himself into the limbo of space between their sentences. Waiting. Wondering. Watching. A bird of prey that knows better than to swoop for quarry it knows next to nothing about. A wolf in sheep's clothing.
Or perhaps a livestock guardian, from whom they have lost the right to protection.
To patience.
To kindness.
Bathed in flames and showered in the ashes of the forest they'd called home for months, Abolish cuts an imposing figure — a man who is not yet a monster, and all the more terrifying for it. Beyond the smoke that veils his gaze, there is nothing but his desire to return home. No malice in his designs, except the kind that exists in the clinical awareness of weakness matched only by his detached wit in strategy. The savage burn of his wrath. He is not the man Legundo had once been, restraint in his initial responses and fervent in his desire to protect… but he is the mirror of it. The shadow.
Beware the anger of a peaceful man.