(no subject)
Story Title: For This We Are Recreated
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Disturbing Imagery
Word Count: 330 (the shortest one!)
Prompt: "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill (does not have to be taken literally)
The new recruits always asked what they could do to retain themselves. They whispered questions and rumors in their bunks, searched for wisdom under the cover of darkness. She didn’t bother answering them; it was a waste of words. The recruits will be shorn of their memories, their gray matter wiped clean and rewritten with military codes, drills, and protocol. The state will remake them its image. They will fight.
There was a black market in paper: a week’s worth of cigarettes for five blank pages, half a day’s ration for a ballpoint pen. Each set of recruits would go through reams before the shearing, spilling as much of their lives onto the pages as they could afford, starving for their past. She had her own collection once: a description of dark chocolate, sketches of her family, her son’s name. Symbols of items that once held meaning. The pages were lost during a raid three years ago. She didn’t miss them; they were unnecessary. All she carried from her former life was her body and that kept its silence. Light puckered lines crisscrossed her dark skin, but they were all new reminders: to be careful, to be vigilant, to be quick. There was only one older scar, a tiny discolored circle on the side of her hand. A medic discovered it as he pulled shrapnel out from her arm, tried to distract her from her current situation by explaining its origin. She’d been born with a sixth finger. Someone must have removed it in her infancy, bound the tiny digit tightly with a piece of twine until it slipped off, the dead skin ashy over dark bloat.
If the procedure hurt, she didn’t remember it.
The past was unimportant. The excess had been sloughed off, leaving only the neverending fight, her comrades laughs and screams, and the drive to keep moving ever forward, to steal breath as long as she was able.
She woke and prepared for battle once more.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Disturbing Imagery
Word Count: 330 (the shortest one!)
Prompt: "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill (does not have to be taken literally)
The new recruits always asked what they could do to retain themselves. They whispered questions and rumors in their bunks, searched for wisdom under the cover of darkness. She didn’t bother answering them; it was a waste of words. The recruits will be shorn of their memories, their gray matter wiped clean and rewritten with military codes, drills, and protocol. The state will remake them its image. They will fight.
There was a black market in paper: a week’s worth of cigarettes for five blank pages, half a day’s ration for a ballpoint pen. Each set of recruits would go through reams before the shearing, spilling as much of their lives onto the pages as they could afford, starving for their past. She had her own collection once: a description of dark chocolate, sketches of her family, her son’s name. Symbols of items that once held meaning. The pages were lost during a raid three years ago. She didn’t miss them; they were unnecessary. All she carried from her former life was her body and that kept its silence. Light puckered lines crisscrossed her dark skin, but they were all new reminders: to be careful, to be vigilant, to be quick. There was only one older scar, a tiny discolored circle on the side of her hand. A medic discovered it as he pulled shrapnel out from her arm, tried to distract her from her current situation by explaining its origin. She’d been born with a sixth finger. Someone must have removed it in her infancy, bound the tiny digit tightly with a piece of twine until it slipped off, the dead skin ashy over dark bloat.
If the procedure hurt, she didn’t remember it.
The past was unimportant. The excess had been sloughed off, leaving only the neverending fight, her comrades laughs and screams, and the drive to keep moving ever forward, to steal breath as long as she was able.
She woke and prepared for battle once more.