A/N: Little sommat I wrote one night. As always, feedback is greatly appreciated. Anything you can give. Enjoy!

I Am the Soldier

I am a soldier.

I am the soldier.

I am the soldier who entered the army nervous, apprehensive, afraid to kill, praying he would never have to.

There were battles. Cracks of rifles and ringing of swords against scabbards, the dull ‘thunks’ of bodies hitting the earth. I ran blindly through it all, clutching my weapons tight to my body and just trying to survive. There was death all around me, the scent of carrion flesh always in the air. But no one was dead by my hand, yet. And I thought that maybe I could emerge from this unscathed.

The first time I killed, it was in self-defense. It always is. An enemy soldier was charging me, and I held up my pistol with trembling fingers and shot him at point-blank range. The impact of the shot knocked us both back, and I saw his eyes widen in shock as he crumpled to the ground. I went to him, turned the body over. There was blood on my hands, someone else's blood, eye-searingly red, sickening. I felt unclean. I looked away from his vacant face, struggled to my feet, ran.

There were more battles. It didn't become any easier to kill, but it became easier to not care. Shots fired blindly into masses of enemy colors, it would kill them, but it would save you. To kill became to live.

We took the city, and it was no different. There were soldiers everywhere. Kill or be killed. Fire on sight. We could only survive once they were dead.

I had to kill some of them. I was handed a sword, pointed to a captive. I had to kill him, or he would kill me, they would all kill me.

I never thought to ask how he could kill me, bound to a post, weak and starving and half-dead. I never knew that he and his fellows had surrendered, had pleaded for their lives. I killed him so he wouldn't kill me.

How do you live your life with these memories? How can you live with yourself when you've done things that you were taught were unspeakable since the age of two? The atrocities I'd committed, I had tried to make quick. But they still lingered in my mind. Piles of corpses, dead by my hand, swam before my eyes. Panicked cries for mercy rang in my ears, cut off by a screeching sword, playing over and over again in my mind. If I stood still for long enough, I felt a man's hair in my hand as I yanked his head back and held my blade to his neck, and I heard him begging, pleading me to have mercy. If I had unclenched my fingers, he would have gone home to his wife and children, seen another sunrise.

But I didn't, and there was blood on my hands once again, sickeningly warm with the life flowing out of him, onto me. Spilled life.

I threw myself into the life I was rebuilding for myself, back at home, my home… except it didn’t feel like that anymore. My home was out there, wasn’t it? In that other country, on cots on the hard earth, with the thrumming of mortars in the distance and explosions that vibrated the ground you slept on, but you had to catch sleep where you could and so you slept anyway. We slept in turn, but remembering it now… I trusted those men with my life, but I didn’t know them. None of us knew each other, because we were changing every moment. Because that’s what a soldier must do, if he wants to survive. It’s all about adaptation. Anyone who stayed the same long enough for you to get to know him… he was dead. It was a death sentence. No power in the world could protect someone you actually knew.

And adaptation was the reason we learned to sleep when bombs and grenades rocked our makeshift bunkers. But now… My brain is too busy to let me fall asleep. It shows me things, again and again… Rustling leaves outside my open bedroom window are enough to wake me with a start and send me jumping out of bed, catapulting over the headboard and grabbing for a rifle that’s actually my old hobby horse from when I was two. And I stop and wonder why I put it there, and I can’t quite remember, except that I thought it was important at the time…

I threw myself into rebuilding my life because it wasn’t my life anymore. I didn’t recognize people I passed on the street, even though they were the same people I had know before. I didn’t know them now. Or, they didn’t know me. There was no way they could.

But also, if I attacked something like decorating my home, or ordering and reordering and alphabetizing and color coding my books, with enough ferocity, I didn’t have to hear that horrible screeching sword play itself over and over in my head, because I knew somewhere in the pit of my stomach that was even beyond conscious thought, that I had no chance of blocking out—I knew that that sword was in my hand, and that the next sound I would hear would be a scream.

So in a way, maybe it’s good that, most of the time, all that I heard was the sword, or the rattle of machine guns—a death rattle—or the deep bass booms of mortars. Because it wasn’t the screams. It was rare that my mind played back to me men and women screaming, begging for mercy, the sound of steel cutting flesh and the crackling of flaming skin, and the feeling of a sword lodged against bone that my muscles remember only too well. I would hear myself killing, but I wouldn’t hear myself taking a life.

And when it did arise in my mind, to hear myself taking a life was utterly unbearable. So I grew to appreciate, almost, the simple scrape of the sword on the scabbard that I would hear anytime it was quiet enough in my head.

Because out there, drawing that sword meant someone else was going to die, which meant that I was going to live another day, another hour, another minute.

I never used to measure my life in minutes. Now it seems to pass in seconds. I can feel each clicking by. They all seem like an eternity. I feel as if I’ll never reach the end of it.

But I will go on, anyway. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. It’s what was drummed into me, in all those years, crawling on my stomach through trenches, eighty pounds on my shoulders, hands sticky with blood, rubber-soled boots coming down again and again and again on cold, hard, red-dirt ground, and again and again until I can’t keep it straight anymore. You kill whoever tries to kill you, and you wipe the blood from your blade and you put one foot in front of the other and you go on.

This much I have learned, because I am a soldier.

Just another soldier.