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Hughie Campbell could not recognize for sure what it was that "something" that captivated him about the newly integrated member of the group: Soldier Boy. Campbell was aware of the potential danger he represented, that if this... "being" dressed in green became enraged it would mean the end of their lives... fortunately it would be a quick death. In any case, you don't feel anything if your nerves are incinerated in the middle of a massive radiation blast and you find yourself right next to the thing that caused it, do you?
Hughie used to curse those times when Butcher left him at the mercy of Soldier Boy to go do God knows what. Sometimes Campbell did not perceive Soldier Boy as a person, a human being... no, how could he? A man who has the right to be acknowledged with the adjective "alive" doesn't have that lost look in the void... he doesn't have that pair of dead eyes that reveal nothing, just a deep spiral of darkness, of nothingness. There is no glow, not a single light... just nothing.
At some point he came to consider the idea that perhaps war finally made Soldier Boy reach a point of no return, or maybe it was spending too much time locked up facing his darkest demons with no one to help him, all alone at the mercy of his enemies who did indescribable things to him that he himself tries to forget in a sea of alcohol, the reason why he is now a broken man, a man without a future, without hope and with the only yearning to be able to get revenge because that is what motivates his life, because it is his only purpose.
Hughie wondered how miserable you must be for the only reason you wake up every morning, the only reason your heart beats, the only reason you haven't thrown in the towel is precisely because of revenge. How much hatred must a human store so much that his only reason to exist is to end the life of the one who harmed him? Campbell was aware that what hurt Soldier Boy the most were not physical wounds resulting from torture, why he sought so desperately to achieve his goal was not even due to the fact that he had been locked up, but from whom the betrayal came from.
Sometimes when they had the opportunity, or when Soldier Boy was in a good mood because of having so much alcohol in his system to the point of not being able to formulate sentences properly, the soldier would open up and reveal little snippets of his humble past. What hurt the soldier the most was that he gave a sea of love and received nothing in return, how his heart and feelings were brutalized. How those pleasurable sensations he once felt were immediately replaced by a constant discomfort that haunted him even in his dreams. Soldier Boy never believed that the hardest blow he would ever receive in his entire life was not even a physical one; but that only a few words were enough to bring him down completely.
If Soldier Boy had to describe that situation in one word it would be "disappointment". He had a life plan: he would have a partner, raise sons, boys of course, whom he would take it upon himself to make into men he would be proud of and who would most likely follow in his footsteps and become soldiers whose names would go down in the history books. He was not against the possibility of having a daughter. He would take it upon himself to protect her, to take care of her and of course to instruct her; not to let any man, scum just like him, touch her. Only maybe he would have been able to understand women a little more and stop seeing them as a sexual object.
But no, his plans failed, his dreams were destroyed and the person he thought he loved, for who he would abandon the whole world to save, had betrayed him. Soldier Boy still remains astonished, he cannot understand how a "I hated you" was enough to destroy him, to break that part of him that was still human. Not only was it that, but what he once thought was love was actually hate in disguise.
Hughie Campbell lies next to a man who is wounded, who at one point believed that he would be rescued, that it was probably all a trick, that perhaps because of his behavior his team was teaching him a lesson and that suddenly everyone would come out laughing at him, making jokes about the situation in general.
But when time passed and the reality hurt more and more, when all he had around him was a dark room with no windows, no doors, no way out, complete emptiness... things changed.
Hughie has at his side a man with a pair of dead eyes, a pair of beautiful green dead eyes that are endowed with a particular darkness, revealing exactly where he is and the color of his soul, if he has one. A man who has lost himself in the void, who resorts to noise to try to chase away evil thoughts, and who sometimes finds the most ingenious ways to lose consciousness because his senses are shattered and wants to find a way to stop the pain. Hughie has by his side the most dangerous man on the planet, a man with a single purpose and who has nothing to lose because it has already been taken away from him or he did the job for himself, because that is what people like him do: they drive away, hurt, transform for the worse the people who at some point have shown genuine affection.
Hughie wants to sink into that pair of dead eyes, at some point the very idea of licking them crossed his mind, and it is that he cannot explain under any logical reason, under any consistent argument why it is that he is attracted to them. Once Soldier Boy asked Hughie if he was scared of him, to which Hughie nodded. He didn't want to lie to him, he didn't want to be hypocritical or sugarcoat things, he simply told him the truth. At this the eternal soldier smiled, finally someone had given him an honest answer, how he hated people who tried to use terms to supposedly lessen the damage of words when those very words were sticking like daggers to his heart. All he wanted was the truth and the truth was what he got.
Soldier Boy is indisposed, barely able to stand. So he collapses onto the couch and for the sake of comfort lays his head on Hughie's legs.
Before he closes his eyes and begs to be devoured by nothingness, begs for his senses to shut down. And for a moment before he enters that small space where there are no thoughts, where there is nothing, his dead eyes meet Hughie's full of life eyes. A smile forms on Soldier Boy's lips as Hughie strokes his hair.
"Thank you."