Work Text:
I’m kneeling in the mud. Lightning breaks the sky, thunder shakes the world below. Heavy raindrops hit my trembling body.
I bury my face in my hands, don’t care about the mud, the dirt, the blood. Maybe I should be crying. Maybe I should be screaming in grief, in agony about the loss, the death, the pain.
I am crying, I then realize. Thick tears flow over my cheeks, my chin, my throat. Sweet, sweet tears. Maybe my body realized it should be in agony. My mind hasn’t. Yet.
Steps come closer. Steps I would recognize anywhere.
He stops.
“Princess,” he says. I don’t look up, don’t even move.
“Princess.” He crouches down, to my side. Touches my back slightly. He sighs, brushes his hand through my hair.
“This is it,” Kenji says. “This is the war.”
I sob slightly, raising my head. “It’s horrible,” I whisper.
Now I feel it.
The pain.
The agony.
The grief.
It’s horrible.
I’m empty and full, I feel like someone carved my heart out and filled the space in my chest with spikes. Big, pointy spikes piercing me, cutting me open from the inside.
I bury my hands in the mud, try to grip something, try to hold on to something that isn’t hurtful. But the world is slipping through my fingers, I grip too tight, too fast, to firm, and can’t hold onto it, it slips away, slowly and quickly. My breath quickens, my body trembles, my vision blurs.
Kenji grabs my wrist. He says my name. His voice is rough, but it’s a sweet sound, so kind and pure, that my breath hitches. My pounding heart slows down, and I look at him, look at those eyes, look at the trust he places in me. His hair sticks to his forehead, the rain presses it flat down. Raindrops stream down his face, I can’t see if he’s crying. But his jaw is clenched, his eyes broken.
“You did good,” he says. I almost can’t hear it. “You did great. You saved them.”
I sob silently, the tears just don’t want to stop. He offers me his hand, pulls me up as I grab it.
“Don’t look,” he says, but I’ve already closed my eyes. I can’t look at it, at all I’ve done. Done to people who were soldiers, yes, but maybe had families. Friends. Lives. I took that from them and them from their loved ones.
It takes a long time to leave the mud, the death behind us. But finally, the thick smell of blood fades away. We leave it behind, just like I try to leave the grief. It won’t work, and nothing will be like it was before. But I don’t care, as long as Kenji is by my side, ready to walk through a field of dead soldiers, just to pick up his princess from the mud on a battlefield.