Chapter 23 - The Flame

Author's Note: Between proof-reading it and posting it tomorrow, and just posting it now and editing it later.. Ahem, prudent aspiring author that I am, I opted for the latter. Feel free to help me edit out any typos so atrocious that they would burn a hole right through your monitor.

In the end, I had to admit that they tried, they really did. These “Eternal”, or “The Worthy”, as they’d referred to themselves, scrounged up whatever they could from the dreary confines of my hellish past and slammed it against me with all the grace and elegance of an arthritic elephant. I felt as though I should at least momentarily stagger and falter for a couple steps, just as a consolation prize for trying so damn hard. And try they did, that’s for damn sure.

They threw Comanche Plains at me, all blood and desolation, with the guts of that cute private - the blonde, the one with the infectious smile - slipping past my hands as I frantically tried to shove them back into her abdominal cavity through a gaping hole bigger than both her fists put together. In the end, I’d marginally succeeded, and looked up to her still, tear-streaked face to realize that in my mad scramble to save the last scraps of her life, I’d robbed her of the last meager measures of a dying soldier’s final dignity. Damn, I’d missed the last opportunity I’d ever have to see her smile again, and I never even learned her name.

I remember that particular experience completely flooring me. After all, it had been the first time one of the very few people I genuinely liked had died in my hands. Likely had a lot to do with the fact that we didn’t really talk much, to the point where I never even found out her name. She would just randomly appear by my side out of nowhere wearing that damnably infectious grin, offer a few remarks that blazed like warm sunshine on a rainy monday afternoon, then she would be gone just like that.

She had been special like that. I remember wondering what the hell someone like her was doing in a hellhole like this. I felt that people of her kind were destined to some higher purpose than spilling other people’s blood for no better reason than being told to. That was a job for born killers like me. She couldn’t possibly stay here for long, and would certainly not be fated to die in a grimy little ditch, sunk halfway to her knees in mud caked with her own blood. Definitely not.

Yeah, there was a time when I was naive like that, too.

Of course, with all the other wars that came after, while roving from one battlefield to the next, the blood in my hands had become so ever-present that it just felt like the color of my skin had always been that dull rusty shade of red.

So, I’d never truly aspired for anything grander for myself. For her, however, I knew she truly was not meant to be here. So yeah, I enjoyed what little of her company I could enjoy while she was still wandering around in my world, my self-stylized lower circles of hell.

Secretly - of course, since I could not bear to let her know, severe vulnerability issues and all - I liked her. I even respected her, though I knew almost nothing about her. Let alone the fact that I didn’t like most people to begin with, just on sheer principle. After all, most people were self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-centered pieces of turd - just like myself. The very few select individuals who could make it past the unholy grinder that served as my personality filter could be counted with the fingers of my hands. That number had grown steadily lower as the years passed and Death and Misery become a constant companion and a mistress, respectively. Like the rotting flesh of a gangrenous corpse, those few people had begun to fall, one after the other, until not one was left.

That first time, however, I was still a kid, still a rookie. I’d been in real combat for all of what, two weeks? With the very first platoon under my direct command, I’d decided to try a daring flanking maneuver to force an end to a stalemate that had lasted almost the whole time I’d been deployed to that area - all of two weeks. My first platoon had loyally followed me straight into an enemy ambush, and I’d watched most of them die before they even had the time to empty their clips. Including blondie, whose vacant eyes seemed to bore holes through my soul and ask me a single question: why?

I silently agreed with her. I could not believe I was being forced to be a witness to this cosmic injustice. How could a luminary such as her be snuffed out in this god forsaken pisswater ass end of nowhere? I could not bear to search for an answer, and so for the next couple days I’d drowned myself in alcohol and nearly gotten myself killed in half a dozen suicide rushes against the enemy lines. Most thought I needed to redeem myself or prove that my first platoon’s deaths had not been in vain.

Fools, all of them. I don't think they ever understood.

What I had truly been doing was trying to find an answer to a question that seared my insides until my heart lay in a crumpled, smoking heap. I was daring fate to give me an answer, to explain to me how it could scythe down blondie’s shimmering, wondrous mortal coil, then leave a walking automaton like me with not a single scratch after rushing an enemy emplacement with nothing but an assault rifle and a belt of grenades.

That’s life, I learned. Never gives you answers, and instead just keeps slapping you on the face with more insufferable questions.

In the end, we pushed the enemy back with heavy losses. Three weeks after, in some remote neutral village, a treaty was signed and our boys were told to pack up and leave. The mudfields drenched in crimson we had been watering with our precious lifeblood were thrown away just like that.

Of course, this time it was all different.

“It.. it hurts. It hurts so much.. I didn’t think, I didn’t.. Agh..” Her ragged gasps came in faster and faster, her voice pained as it hissed out in between tightly clenched teeth.

Another explosion shook the ground around us. Screams of pain rose in response as a mixture of dirt, shrapnel and blood came down raining down in an oddly rhythmic splattering. The acrid smell of gunpowder and burnt flesh assaulted my nose, but I hardly noticed it as I kept my unwavering gaze focused on the person whose hands were gripping mine in a deathgrip.

“I know. It will get better. Try to slow down your breathing, and keep holding my hand,” I offered.

“Lieutenant, I.. I’m not gonna.. Ah, I’m not gonna make it, am I?” came her faltering voice, breaking up at the end. Tears started to spill down her golden, sun-freckled cheeks.

I squeezed her hand a little tighter and moved my gaze up to look fully into her eyes without a hint of hesitation or fear. Instead, it was something I’d never shown her in all the time she had smiled at me, during these past couple weeks.

“Since when did you become the platoon’s medic?” I spoke softly, a very rare, genuine smile curving my lips.

It was an invitation.

A long pause ensued, during which her expression suddenly froze into a disbelieving mask, then her expression gradually darkened, though her eyes finally glittered with something other than tears.

“Some.. someone’s gotta do it. Stupid bastard’s probably smoking a joint around the back again- “ She cut off as she coughed weakly, her whole body convulsing around the hideous wound in her abdomen. She looked up again and I could see flecks of blood coloring her lips.

“Knew I should have dismissed the lazy ingrate,” I replied softly, with no trace of humour in my tone.

“Use.. useless. Probably get stuck with some lazier bastard who’s even more incompetent, to boot,” she replied, but in her eyes I could see the fatal question begin to dawn upon her, slowly but surely creeping in to extend its shadow over her gaze. “Hey lieutenant..”

“Yes,” I answered gently, preempting her. “Hell why not, I’ve managed to get us stuck in this hellhole, might as well drop the titles and call me by my name. If we make it out, then I’ll think about charging you up for insubordination.”

Her eyes flashed for a moment with a sudden burst of emotions, cycling through them in quick succession in a myriad dashing colors before me. Amusement. Bitterness. Regret. Fear.

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Huh. No blame, however. Impressive.

She really was special, this one.

“Michael,” came her voice, and the words were slow, not tentative but rather deliberate, as though she were enjoying a rare wine. “why the hell did you ever think this was a good idea?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one that followed me, remember?” I asked, and both of us shared a bitter smile. It was the smile shared between two people who had suddenly formed a bond, not in a fickle interpersonal relationship such as friendship, governed as it was by the whims of emotion. Rather, it was the respect and honor shown to a comrade, from one sovereign entity to another, submitted under the banner of a common principle: that of perseverance under the harshest of trials.

This staring at death’s door and sharing a laugh on its face, it definitely qualified as such, no?

“Yeah, like a moth..” she whispered, her lips curved in a self-mocking smile.

“To a flame,” I completed, without really knowing why. It just felt right.

She nodded to me, and I nodded back, and we enjoyed the silence for the space of a single breath. It was a peaceful moment, stolen from the clutches of a grim fate yawning its terrible maw under us.

“Michael,” came her voice, audibly weaker now, her gaze growing just a little more vacant. “My breaths.. come harder now. Pulse no longer hammering. My heart, little champ.. running out of blood to pump. Not fair, it says. Still refuses to give up, but.. but odds are stacked against her.”

I said nothing as I felt her small hands tightening around mine.

“I got a final thing I need to.. need to ask,” she continued, struggling with every word now. Her eyelids started fluttering down, blinking slowly, involuntarily, like a movie when it is just about to reach the end of its reel.

“Re.. rem..” She gasped, and her voice was barely audible. The light in her eyes had almost completely faded away. “Remem.. Remember.. Remember..”

I resisted the primal urge to squeeze my eyes shut, unwilling to let this luminous soul before me fade away without a single pair of eyes to witness the passing of such a precious jewel. Though my eyes burned and a hand was reaching down my chest to squeeze my heart into a bloody mess, still I watched on, nodding my head slowly.

“I will remember you. Whatever else, wherever I am, I will always remember you,” I whispered softly.

Suddenly, an intense light seemed to flare within her eyes as they opened wide, her gaze easily bursting through the mask of solemn grief I’d built up, and penetrating deep, uncomfortably deep inside of me. It was then that I finally learned to listen, truly listen. Not to the noise lips make when the heart is trying to speak, but the unspoken words that filter through a person’s eyes when they open up so wide and with a clarity so sublime, they become windows to a soul. I took it all in, sat there listening though she spoke no more. It was a moment of perfect understanding, and it shook me profoundly.

She nodded then, and her eyes finally drifted closed, a gentle smile slowly lifting the tremulous corners of her mouth upward.

“Remember," she barely whispered, these final words hanging in the air between us. "You are the flame."

Then she was gone.

What?

I didn’t know what to say. What to think. I knelt there, holding the still-warm body of the girl who had just told me, with her dying breath, that I was the flame? The lesson was still too new, too freshly imprinted onto my soul. I could feel that there was.. there was something to her words, a special message that I should listen to, and come to understand deeply, and be moved profoundly. I’d seen that meaning hidden deep in her eyes, listened to the quiet resonance of her soul, the beating of her stubborn heart, and I had known then as I knew now that I was the flame.

I am the flame, and I will burn bright in the night.

It wasn’t blame, that of the butterfly drawn into the embrace of the flame only to be consumed to its very ashes. No, it was the radiance, the warmth, the spectacular delight of suffusing one’s body with the raw power and vitality and might of a little sun bursting, aching to blaze a scorching path to the summit.

No sky was too high, no ocean too deep. I would blaze, I would burn, and I would consume the world entire because that’s who I was.

I was the sun, and I needed no justification, no rationale, no moral high ground to shine brightly upon the middle of the sky.

Burn bright, she had said. Burn, and don’t ever let it go out.

I sat there quietly as bullets hummed around me, ricocheting with a hair-rising scream, or impacted wetly into warm flesh. It was then that I realized I had, somewhere in between the years, the many struggles, the untold battles, allowed myself to fight a losing war. I burned only with the desire to spite fate, to defy the world, to bring it all down with me if I must.

I had forgotten what it felt like, to burn across the sky like a comet soaring through the heavens, wild and free and unyielding. It was a stubbornness born not out of a refusal to lose, but rather an unquenchable thirst to win.

It daring to hope rather than to persevere.

I sat there mutely, lost in the ponderings that seemed to have no end, in meanings which opened new horizons I’d thought long gone. Then I sighed deeply and shook my head ruefully.

Damn, I’d forgotten to ask her name.

Then again, had I ever known it? Then how could I have asked her name? Wasn’t she merely a product of my own tortured memories? A shade from my war-torn past? Then why wasn’t she a hideous beast thirsting for my blood, as all proper ghouls should behave? Instead, she had become a true angel come to deliver me from the depths of my own damnation.

The epiphany I’d been granted had liberated me, cleansed me in a baptism of fire that lit a blazing hunger in my heart. One that had not been lit for a long, long time.

A hunger to hope.

Was it possible, for someone like me? Surely not.

Yet, she had asked, she had guided, and more than her words that single glimpse I had of her soul had given me the answer in a way no arguments or logic could have delivered. It had been a revelation, a vision, a prophecy, and I could not deny that it had deeply, thoroughly moved me.

Would that be possible if she were a mere projection of soul energy?

More questions kept popping into my head until it was just about ready to burst, just like the nearing series of artillery shells raining in the space around me, quickly approaching in my direction.

Right. When in doubt, shoot something until it stops bleeding. Then repeat.

There is definitely something to be said about the therapeutic value of relying upon base born instincts.

Thus, I calmly turned around and grabbing all the extra drums of ammunition and anti-personnel explosives I’d requisitioned from the armory before coming, I blazed a path of fire, bullets and murder across that pitiful 10-mile stretch of jungle. Whatever this powered up state was, I had carried it over from my last soul construct. This meant that I could almost close my eyes and still hear every footstep, almost every click as guns actuated in the area around me. Through the dust and smoke, I could easily make out the shapes of the very few friendlies still left, and more importantly, all the goddamn unfriendlies that were crawling all over my ass.

Ever have an itch that you were just dying to get at? That was me, scratching the proverbial itch, one 5.56mm polymer-cased cartridge at a time.

Poor bastards didn’t even stand a chance.

With every kill, I could feel an invigorating stream of energy entering my veins, fueling a murderous spree that felt strangely distanced from myself, even as I methodically slaughtered foe after foe. It was like playing a game of chess, move by move, against an invisible power and with the highest of stakes. And I was definitely not on the losing side.

I was the flame, and I would burn this whole goddamn world down around me.