Hawkeye 12: #3, 8
Warning: The Hawkeye 12 will not be a very fun set of themes. These are radically different in tone from my R15, so if you're looking for more of that, I don't suggest you look here. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this ongoing effort (and, as always, give me a heads up if you feel the characters are OOC).
A little note: I'm not writing these in the chronological order I should be, so expect me to oscillate between Riza's cadet days and Ishvar. When I finish these (if I finish these), I'll try to put them in order.
3. Back
When it boiled down to it, 2nd Lt. Riza Hawkeye had never given much thought to honor.
Honor. n. a keen sense of right and wrong; adherence to action or principles considered right; integrity
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t that she didn’t possess a moral code, some frame of ethics she tried to fit the world into, desperately trying to make the world make sense. On the contrary, she thought about ethics and morals a lot. During the long, cold nights lying too exhausted or alert to sleep. During long waits, cramped into one sitting position for hours, her muscles threatening to mold and freeze into a living statue. During long silent, hushed hikes through the blasted city, the only sounds the hustling footsteps of her men or the drives through the desert beneath the merciless sun or the brilliant stars.
It was either ethics or death and she discovered very early that thinking too much about the latter would drive her insane.
But not honor, never consciously, never deliberately.
He never even knew she was there.
One tap on the hair trigger-one finger spasm against the little piece of metal-and the curtains raised upon the silent play she watched through the opera glasses of her scope: an explosion of red-a cloud of it--a stumble, a fall, clutching, twitching, writhing, stillness-and if she held her breath and listened hard enough, she thought maybe she could hear him gurgling.
He never even knew what hit him.
Honor. vt. to show great respect or high regard for, treat with deference and courtesy
Riza Hawkeye did not think about honor. She thought about how easy it was to shoot a man in the back.
8. The Roar of the Sea
It wasn’t that Ishvar wasn’t beautiful. It was, in its pockmarked streets and buildings, in the crumbling faces of walls, in the insides laid bare (living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms-life-size doll houses, too real in their accuracies, put on grotesque exhibition), in piles of ashes that retained some shape of their former structures, in a cracked photograph on a nightstand that had been thoughtfully angled to face the bed before she knocked it off in her haste to find cover.
It was painfully beautiful in the suggestions of what it had once been, of what it could have been, it what it could never again be.
A lost jewel in this sea of sand.
A sea that lived. A sea that roared in every echoing bomb blast, that raged in every whistling bullet, that wept in red rivulets down its sandy cheeks, that sighed and moaned in the breeze during the quiet times to dispel any illusion of peace.
This sea will devour me, Riza Hawkeye thought.
Until she realized that they were devouring it.
A little note: I'm not writing these in the chronological order I should be, so expect me to oscillate between Riza's cadet days and Ishvar. When I finish these (if I finish these), I'll try to put them in order.
3. Back
When it boiled down to it, 2nd Lt. Riza Hawkeye had never given much thought to honor.
Honor. n. a keen sense of right and wrong; adherence to action or principles considered right; integrity
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t that she didn’t possess a moral code, some frame of ethics she tried to fit the world into, desperately trying to make the world make sense. On the contrary, she thought about ethics and morals a lot. During the long, cold nights lying too exhausted or alert to sleep. During long waits, cramped into one sitting position for hours, her muscles threatening to mold and freeze into a living statue. During long silent, hushed hikes through the blasted city, the only sounds the hustling footsteps of her men or the drives through the desert beneath the merciless sun or the brilliant stars.
It was either ethics or death and she discovered very early that thinking too much about the latter would drive her insane.
But not honor, never consciously, never deliberately.
He never even knew she was there.
One tap on the hair trigger-one finger spasm against the little piece of metal-and the curtains raised upon the silent play she watched through the opera glasses of her scope: an explosion of red-a cloud of it--a stumble, a fall, clutching, twitching, writhing, stillness-and if she held her breath and listened hard enough, she thought maybe she could hear him gurgling.
He never even knew what hit him.
Honor. vt. to show great respect or high regard for, treat with deference and courtesy
Riza Hawkeye did not think about honor. She thought about how easy it was to shoot a man in the back.
8. The Roar of the Sea
It wasn’t that Ishvar wasn’t beautiful. It was, in its pockmarked streets and buildings, in the crumbling faces of walls, in the insides laid bare (living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms-life-size doll houses, too real in their accuracies, put on grotesque exhibition), in piles of ashes that retained some shape of their former structures, in a cracked photograph on a nightstand that had been thoughtfully angled to face the bed before she knocked it off in her haste to find cover.
It was painfully beautiful in the suggestions of what it had once been, of what it could have been, it what it could never again be.
A lost jewel in this sea of sand.
A sea that lived. A sea that roared in every echoing bomb blast, that raged in every whistling bullet, that wept in red rivulets down its sandy cheeks, that sighed and moaned in the breeze during the quiet times to dispel any illusion of peace.
This sea will devour me, Riza Hawkeye thought.
Until she realized that they were devouring it.