Work Text:
Once, in an odd moment of vulnerability, you tell Rin.
“The worst thing is the smells.”
Her eyes widen in realization and her nose wrinkles in sympathy as she imagines all the nauseating scents of a battlefield magnified a thousand fold and she says “Oh, yeah that must suck.”
That’s not what you meant at all, but you’ve exceeded your quota for openness for the day, so you don’t elaborate.
The smell of a battlefield is not horrible because it is the smell of blood and guts and burned and rotting flesh. The smell of a battlefield is horrible because it is the smell of people, and so many of them happen to be dead.
After a battle the air reeks of the smell of excrement, and from it you know what the dead had been eating, and how stressed they’ve been recently and whether any of them were sick.
The terrible thing about a battlefield is not an overwhelming miasma of smell, but the thousand minute subtleties of smells. Each person, living and dead, has their own scent, as unique to them as a fingerprint.
It is a terrible thing to look your enemy in the eye and kill them. So people don’t, usually. They glance away and move on, see uniforms instead of faces. It is a hard thing, impossibly hard, to kill the enemy when you can smell their fear.
You can look out on a battlefield and see only corpses, distant, impersonal. You can turn your head away and close your eyes. But people never smell like anything other than humans, no matter how rotten or wrong, they always smell like once-alive-dead individuals. You cannot turn the direction of the wind, and you cannot stop breathing.
The wind shifts, and for half a moment you catch a scent and your step falters.
“What’s wrong?” Rin, the medic, ever attentive to her teammates, asks.
For half a moment you caught the scent of a woman. She was pregnant and now she is dead. You wonder if the father is still alive, you wonder if they knew.
“Nothing,” you say.
There is a woman who is dead and a child who will never be born, and in war none of this matters.