ask yourself:
WHO: Soldier Blue
WHERE: with the other Soldier Blue
WHEN: 11/17
WARNINGS: woe.
SUMMARY: forcing the reconciliation of flaws and the future with the present isn't going as well as one would like
FORMAT: distress
He had been asleep for four days, listening to comrades and his kindred wail and die. Four days was really nothing, comparatively. What was four days to fifteen years asleep and of no use? Those Mu he loved and wished to protect knew patience better than he did. They were relief and understanding upon his awakening; the only one truly distressed was Soldier Blue himself.
Was it inevitable, becoming that weak and useless?
They had become reminders, even moreso than before, of the things he would and wouldn't do. Of choices he would make, courses he would lead little less than a hundred lives down, so hopeful and deserving of better. He would have to believe it the best means, otherwise why attempt it at all? Enough people had died already.
Yet more were going to die anyway, and nobody could say he didn't see it coming.
Blue's name was etched into metal, planted into the ground near a tree clinging to the last dying leaves of the season. Until the land was tended to again, the plaque could only read "SOLDIER" while the rest was hidden by fall. There were plenty other soldiers asleep there, tended to and watched over by the scattered people whose lives were affected by their passing. They didn't need to be present for Blue to see the care given to those plots weekly - maybe even daily in some cases. Those were monuments to soldiers, but he hadn't yet seen one that outright said "SOLDIER". Private, Captain, Second Lieutenant...and then names.
Blue is just a color.
He couldn't stand in that field for too long before the knots in his stomach caused his body to shake in the wind, not accustomed to such cold, not even space. His power blanketed him there, but without that necessity, Blue had taken to allowing sharp breezes to cut him. It made him feel a part of something he had no claim to: that he could be just as part of an Earth he didn't truly belong to at all.
It still bothered him, now much more constantly with the feelings of Nazca boring holes into his heart anew. It bothered him that as he walked about he was also a dead thing under the ground. He lived and rotted all at once, seemingly destined to have his future end in the City's past. It was still a sight he could watch on the Network if he had the stomach to. Strung up on a tree...
When the old friends looked at him, was that what they saw? The old friends of the City...The ones remaining. The ones who had lamented aloud at the sight of it. The ones who saw him freshly arrived and greeted him like a lost loved one when he had never laid eyes upon any of them before. Standing near, he had felt their familiarity, respect, and love for him. For the Soldier Blue rotting underground. And though they said they could love him just the same now...
Soldier Blue did not believe himself to be Soldier Blue. Worse, he did not know if he wanted to become that Soldier Blue. Not knowing what he knew. Not knowing that his good intentions brought forth strife and death to the people he wished to save.
It wasn't all his fault, of course, but he couldn't bring himself to shrug off blame. It had all started because of him, hadn't it? A hundred years ago. If it were one of the others who had awakened first, would it have made any difference at all? And was wanting to change the course of his future of any value?
To be destined to do the things he would do...Blue agonized over it. All those unclear choices, critiquing them despite their whole truth being hidden from him. He could only see the second-hand memories of those things through his friends. Through Leo, through Physis, through Ruka and Bakura and all the people that smiled at him like they'd known him for much longer.
Blue listened to himself speak in those old recordings. His voice was so quiet, but his words were strength and resolve. How could he be so certain of the things he said? If he had known what was going to happen, could he have been so certain? Was he going to forget everything he felt and learned on his journey back, giving him the merciful means to hope?
Where did that leave the Soldier Blue who doubted it all? Was he irrelevant, even now? Did it really matter how he felt about this or that, because the future was cemented and already certain? Was he even the Soldier, or did living there and thinking those things warp him and fashion a completely new reality that he was going to go back to and change utterly?
Over and over he asked himself: Who am I? And over and over again he replied, more and more despairingly: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
The night would come sooner than before and force him back, and much to his disgust and distress, he feared returning to the ones he loved and longed to protect. He was nothing without them, and yet, thinking as he thought, he wasn't theirs, was he? Not the Soldier that so certainly looked forward. Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
Nobody was more ashamed of that than he.
WHERE: with the other Soldier Blue
WHEN: 11/17
WARNINGS: woe.
SUMMARY: forcing the reconciliation of flaws and the future with the present isn't going as well as one would like
FORMAT: distress
He had been asleep for four days, listening to comrades and his kindred wail and die. Four days was really nothing, comparatively. What was four days to fifteen years asleep and of no use? Those Mu he loved and wished to protect knew patience better than he did. They were relief and understanding upon his awakening; the only one truly distressed was Soldier Blue himself.
Was it inevitable, becoming that weak and useless?
They had become reminders, even moreso than before, of the things he would and wouldn't do. Of choices he would make, courses he would lead little less than a hundred lives down, so hopeful and deserving of better. He would have to believe it the best means, otherwise why attempt it at all? Enough people had died already.
Yet more were going to die anyway, and nobody could say he didn't see it coming.
Blue's name was etched into metal, planted into the ground near a tree clinging to the last dying leaves of the season. Until the land was tended to again, the plaque could only read "SOLDIER" while the rest was hidden by fall. There were plenty other soldiers asleep there, tended to and watched over by the scattered people whose lives were affected by their passing. They didn't need to be present for Blue to see the care given to those plots weekly - maybe even daily in some cases. Those were monuments to soldiers, but he hadn't yet seen one that outright said "SOLDIER". Private, Captain, Second Lieutenant...and then names.
Blue is just a color.
He couldn't stand in that field for too long before the knots in his stomach caused his body to shake in the wind, not accustomed to such cold, not even space. His power blanketed him there, but without that necessity, Blue had taken to allowing sharp breezes to cut him. It made him feel a part of something he had no claim to: that he could be just as part of an Earth he didn't truly belong to at all.
It still bothered him, now much more constantly with the feelings of Nazca boring holes into his heart anew. It bothered him that as he walked about he was also a dead thing under the ground. He lived and rotted all at once, seemingly destined to have his future end in the City's past. It was still a sight he could watch on the Network if he had the stomach to. Strung up on a tree...
When the old friends looked at him, was that what they saw? The old friends of the City...The ones remaining. The ones who had lamented aloud at the sight of it. The ones who saw him freshly arrived and greeted him like a lost loved one when he had never laid eyes upon any of them before. Standing near, he had felt their familiarity, respect, and love for him. For the Soldier Blue rotting underground. And though they said they could love him just the same now...
Soldier Blue did not believe himself to be Soldier Blue. Worse, he did not know if he wanted to become that Soldier Blue. Not knowing what he knew. Not knowing that his good intentions brought forth strife and death to the people he wished to save.
It wasn't all his fault, of course, but he couldn't bring himself to shrug off blame. It had all started because of him, hadn't it? A hundred years ago. If it were one of the others who had awakened first, would it have made any difference at all? And was wanting to change the course of his future of any value?
To be destined to do the things he would do...Blue agonized over it. All those unclear choices, critiquing them despite their whole truth being hidden from him. He could only see the second-hand memories of those things through his friends. Through Leo, through Physis, through Ruka and Bakura and all the people that smiled at him like they'd known him for much longer.
Blue listened to himself speak in those old recordings. His voice was so quiet, but his words were strength and resolve. How could he be so certain of the things he said? If he had known what was going to happen, could he have been so certain? Was he going to forget everything he felt and learned on his journey back, giving him the merciful means to hope?
Where did that leave the Soldier Blue who doubted it all? Was he irrelevant, even now? Did it really matter how he felt about this or that, because the future was cemented and already certain? Was he even the Soldier, or did living there and thinking those things warp him and fashion a completely new reality that he was going to go back to and change utterly?
Over and over he asked himself: Who am I? And over and over again he replied, more and more despairingly: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
The night would come sooner than before and force him back, and much to his disgust and distress, he feared returning to the ones he loved and longed to protect. He was nothing without them, and yet, thinking as he thought, he wasn't theirs, was he? Not the Soldier that so certainly looked forward. Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
Nobody was more ashamed of that than he.