Joakim pulled up a seat next to Lucia as the girl gazed at him with sunny eyes.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come see me, Joakim.” she spoke with a slight smile.
“Oh. Y-You have?” Joakim said, surprised by the answer. He was still so occupied by Malin’s death that he hadn’t realized that Lucia had wanted to speak with him after she regained consciousness.
“Of course. After I woke up this morning, the doctors told me that it was you who rescued me from the power plant. I can’t thank you enough. You saved my life.”
“Nothing to thank me for,” Joakim scoffed. “I just did as I was told.”
“And what you did was no small task,” Lucia reminded him. “I live because of you.”
Joakim straightened his back and said nothing, but he formed a smile that Lucia knew all too well was being forced. She knew that his eyes weren’t fixed on hers. Rather, it seemed that he was gazing past her.
“You know,” Lucia said, changing the topic to something less awkward and much more recent. “The doctors said I should be good to attend Malin’s funeral in two days.”
Silence filled the room as Joakim understood that Lucia was told of what happened on Terra. With Malin being the only other girl Lucia had been able to speak to in the two years Klaudia and Meinrad were gone—and frankly the only one who tolerated her presence—Joakim had a duty onto her that he felt he needed to fulfill.
“Lucia,” Joakim chimed after several moments. “Do you know what her last words were?”
“No…” she admitted, the tone of her voice softening. “I don’t know.”
“She said she wanted me to become her mum’s ward. So that way she wouldn’t have to go back to the mines, and I could have a place to live.” he spoke truthfully.
“Were those really the last things she said?”
“Mhm,” Joakim nodded. “I didn’t expect it either. All she showed me was pure indifference before. Like I was just another element in her environment. You had the same experience with her, I’m sure. Nothing could’ve prepared me for her last words. Even—even now, I’m…”
“I wish I got to see that,” Lucia spoke with a sniffle. Her eyes were thoroughly wet as tears slowly slid down her face. “The kind of person she could’ve been. I always knew she was capable of being sweet and friendly. I knew something would break her out of her shell someday, but for it to be her death? Fate is so cruel. So, so cruel.”
Her crying was the only sound besides the beeping of the machines inside the hospital room, Joakim allowing her to let her raw emotion out as there would be no later chance to. After two minutes, he fished around his chest pocket and removed a handkerchief from it.
“Here, you can use this.” he offered. Lucia gently took it, using it to wipe her face and eyes.
“Thank you, Joakim.” she nodded gratefully, before handing it back to the boy.
“I haven’t not been able to think about her since the moment it happened. Those last words she said. Holding her hand as she took her last breaths while she let me take the last of her Reserve. Then what Sind—” Joakim brought himself to a halt as he did not want to imagine that harrowing scene again. Then he continued. “It’s made me think about myself too. The way I’ve acted and treated others. The way I treated you.”
“What do you mean?” Lucia asked.
“I was never very grateful for the help you gave me out of your own will. I always tried to push it to the side. But I don’t want my own death to be the first time I show you the gratitude and kindness you deserve,” he admitted, before standing up and stepping a little closer to Lucia. “So for that, I want to say sorry. I want to be a better friend and comrade to you.”
“Joakim,” Lucia said, after a spell of silence that occupied her with contemplation. “Can you deactivate your Anti-Reserve for just a few moments?”
“Umm… sure.” he answered, even though he didn’t understand the odd request.
He was suddenly grabbed by Lucia’s slender but mighty arms as he pulled him into her embrace.
“I accept your apology,” she said with a genuine smile, before quickly letting go of him. “Make sure you stay true to it.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
--
The ceremony was small and short. Colonel Gerlachus, three representatives sent from the Ministry of Martial Education sent on Waldomar Brose’s behalf, the four remaining members of the Frei Squad and most of their family members were the only people gathered around Malin Schenk’s casket. It was vertically placed on top of a casket-lowering machine over her square-shaped open grave in accordance with Titanian tradition, a tradition whose origins lay in creating space for the millions of dead killed during the wars between Karesti and Solich armies. Lucia’s elderly father could not attend due to his health, and neither did Eveline Nordskov on account of her young age. Needless to say Sindri’s parents could not be present either and they wouldn’t have been even if they could. Malin’s fellow squad members and their families were all adorned in clear full-face breathing masks and purple mourning robes fitted for human bodies, and her mother wore a veil of the same colour as well.
“Corporal Schenk did not have the easygoing, sociable personality that many soldiers of the Titanian military carry. From the moment she went into the Frei Squad’s selection system, beating out hundreds of other promising candidates, she never boasted about her power or position. As far as she was concerned, her ability was just another part of her. Not any more special than the hair on her head or the nails on her fingers. Even then, she made it her sworn duty to use her ability to support the efforts of her comrades, and she did so without hesitation or complaint,”
Klaudia, the person chosen to read out Malin’s eulogy, had to stop for a couple moments before her mind could be filled with images of Sindri bashing her corpse’s head. He was the one whose ability synchronised the most with Malin’s, yet she was also the one he chose to take his hatred out on.
I hope she's giving you a damn good beating up there.
“Her selflessness in the face of trial was what made her a true Titanian soldier. Perhaps, even as much as those with Titanian blood. She embodied the true Titanian spirit, ensuring that her team operated smoothly right until the end. She was the best of us. Fly high to paradise, Malin.”
The whirring of the casket lowering machine was all that could be heard for a while, slowly descending Malin’s casket into the ground to a depth of 10 feet.
“It… it should’ve been me…” Meinrad muttered as he stood just behind Klaudia alongside Joakim and Lucia. “I led her to her death. I should be the one inside that coffin, not her!”
Esfir Schenk stomped her way towards the boy, her fists shaking at her sides. Her face was set in what looked to be a severe expression of fury. Looking him right in the eye, she tapped his chest with the side of a fist.
“You have absolutely no right to say that, Meinrad!” she cried.
Everyone expected the worst. For the mother who had lost her child and couldn’t even see her corpse to lash out at the young man whose actions indirectly led to her death was not a farfetched outcome. Meinrad’s own mother and Klaudia’s prepared to tear the woman away from him, while Colonel Gerlachus was ready to step in between Esfir and Meinrad at any moment.
“She didn’t deserve what she got, Meinrad,” Esfir continued using a stern tone while her gazed remained fixed on his eyes. “And you don’t either. None of you do. You’re all soldiers for a reason, but does that mean you can’t die a good death? To be… to be surrounded by people you love, in a warm place? Absolutely not. Everyone of you kids deserves a good death! Don’t you dare think otherwise!”
“Auntie Esfir….” Meinrad muttered, taken aback as Esfir wrapped her shaking arms around his waist and held him tight.
“Don’t even think of saying that ever again,” she repeated. “Don’t you ever.”
--
The ceremony ended and most of the attendees had already left. Only two people remained, one seated at either side of Malin’s grave.
“I saw you on the day you were all sent off to Terra,” Esfir mused, gazing at the flowers on her daughter’s grave, now rock-hard after a short exposure to Titan’s bone-chilling air. “She told me about you. She said that you reminded her of herself. I realise that she probably meant you were another child who had lost their affinity for the good things in life,”
Joakim gazed at the numbers on the girl’s headstone, 999 representing the year she was born, and 1016 signifying the year of her death, at not quite 17 years of age. He nodded politely, giving Esfir the room to speak about her child.
“I don’t know if anything about her life could be considered good. I mean, she was born in a shack just outside of a mine entrance. She'd never eaten real food until after she joined the Squad. But she was happy, for a time. Really happy. After her father’s death she… she became another person. I was like a stranger to her. I had to do something to get her out of her slump, and I thought that something came in the form of signing and returning an application form. Maybe all she needed was a change in her environment.”
Esfir was out of words to say, so she simply stared at the flowers on top of Malin’s rocky grave. What more could her soul say? Her head was flooded with memories of her daughter and husband, now both gone from the universe. Despite that, she could not utter another word.
Joakim removed an object from his uniform pocket, revealing a small pouch that fit in his palm. He opened it, taking a pinch full of a sandy substance out, before rubbing it on the top of Malin’s gravestone.
“We found this in her armor,” he said, a lie. In truth, the bag and its contents were his own doing, taken from the rubble of the wall that Malin herself had made. “I guess she took a handful of sand from Terra to bring back home. I don’t know what she wanted to do with it, but I think it should belong to you, Mrs. Schenk.”
He pulled the bag shut and dropped it into Esfir’s waiting hands. That was it. That was the trigger for the pure pain and heartache that relished inside her chest to spill out. The storm she released was difficult to listen to, and all Joakim could do was let his new guardian know that she was not alone by walking around the grave to her side. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder silently, gazing down at the flowers in front of him. Her head rested on his shoulder as her body shook from the heaves it took. It was a sad day.