The Poet Said
Title: The Poet Said
Author: clodia_metelli
Rating: PG-13
Book/Source: Good Omens.
Characters: War, Wilfred Owen.
Summary: A tiny snippet. War is, well, war. No guts, no glory?.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything and I make no profit from this.
Word Count: 230
This isn’t how it was meant to be.
There isn’t any point in fitting faces to the words. They all thought it. Some of them said it too, cried out despairingly in that final moment. The blood, the mud, the rage and thunder. Glory is a golden word, but it doesn’t shine much when you’re burying your dead in mass graves, or what you can find of them. That old Lie, the poet said, and looked her in the eye when he said it. Pro patria mori...
She was sitting in his trench with her boots on his table, the lamp overhead setting light to her hair and her eyes. He’d thought she was young, but in this light her youth burnt off, was washed away with every splash of blood. He’d seen it dripping from her jacket. She sat in his chair and grinned at him with her fine old face in which all the pitiless years grinned too. He saw her all the time now. Used to be, he’d see her in the distance sometimes or laughing in the windows of the recruitment offices. Then he’d enlisted and now he was here, and so was she, which he’d thought was what he wanted. He’d thought he loved her. He’d thought she’d love him back.
He’d thought a lot of things. This isn’t how it was meant to be...
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