This is why I shouldn't listen to new music...
Title: Some Days
Rating: This could actually be a K but we'll be safe and go with T.
Summary: There's always more than one way to mourn.
Some days... some days were harder than others as he sat atop the scarred wooden desk staring at the small room full of men and women who'd come to him for educate them in all of the different ways that their allies can die if the job they have been entrusted with is not completed in the ways that he's shown to them. He waits and watches silently as the gleam of understanding begins to glow brightly from their eyes before he proceeds to explain, as graphically as possible, all of the different ways in which they will die if their allies are gone and they are left with no one to protect them.
He knows what the whispers say about him. How the whispers call him cold and oftentimes uncaring for the feelings of those he teaches. But it's better that way. Better, because they haven't been the ones to cradle a dying student in their arms with the warmth of life spilling over their hands as frantic shouting for a medic silences the voice that had once taught.
He knows that it will only be a matter of time before those that knew him before; hear the whispers with a sense of disbelief that will be dispelled after he invites to sit in on one of his advanced classes. And is he harsh? Yes. Yes, even he would agree that he is harsh but he prefers the harsh tones of truth to the sweetened desperation that lies lead to. He knows the faces of his students as well as he knows the names that adorn the list he keeps hidden away on a data pad locked with one of the sequences that Red Alert had taught him.
Some days... some days he sits and watches his students with the feeling that he has done everything he could have possibly done. That he has done everything that was asked of him and more in teaching them to save life while at the same time preserving their own. Because in four years he has graduated three classes of forty students with ninety-eight names adorning the list of those he's mourned and kept remembrance of in the only way he has left.