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Fighting was hell.
Lasrounds coming from every angle, the screaming of artillery mixing with the screams of men into a stomach churning symphony that crusended into the ringing in your ears that let you know death was inches away.
Then was the silence that followed afterwards, To Leta, that was the worst. She sat around the camp, legs twitching, bones itching beneath her skin, her very marrow screaming at her to do something, anything.
Finally she stood up and walked, legs aching from unstitched wounds and bruises, she knew better than to bother the poor doc after a battle, if she could breathe, she could wait.
She was bleeding on her side, could feel the sticky coldness of the blood on her undershirt, it must have hurt, it should hurt but the adrenaline hadn’t died down yet, once it did, she’d feel it and by feth would she need the doc then.
On the outskirts of the camp were men digging trenches, pits to bury the dead, a mass unmarked grave that would soon be forgotten, the men wouldn’t be, they’d be remembered for their service to The Emperor or at least that's what Gaunt always said, Leta wasn’t she believed him, how can you be remembered when those who held your memory are also dead?
She tried not to look at the sheet wrapped bodies in case she somehow recognised someone, that was another terrible part about the silence after, searching and waiting, she knew Rawne, Bragg, Larkin, Milo and Caff were okay, she’d seen them sitting at small fires, exchanging swigs of sacra, they’d invited her to join but she couldn’t, Gaunt wasn’t here.
He never was, he was always somewhere else, debriefing other important men on how the fight went and planning the next attack, he never got to rest, never got to sit and wait.
Maybe that was a good thing, if you sit in silence too long you think about what you just did, you notice the blood and dirt under your fingernails, you remember how you killed another living being with a face like yours, even if they were corrupted by the arch enemy.
Shooting a man is different to shooting an animal, even the fiercest toughest predator because the animal isn’t shouting back in a language you understand, with eyes like yours borrowing into your own with a fiery hatred hot enough to melt the hull of a leman russ.
Does the blood ever truly wash away? Even in the hottest showers with all the soap in the galaxy Leta would still feel dirty, she’d been like that ever since she killed her first man now her body count was in the hundreds, killing wasn’t noble, even if it is for the Holy Throne of Terra.
“Middenlocke!” An unknown voice called out to her, she turned to see a dirt covered trooper “Gaunt wants to see you.”
Even with all that said, Leta would kill a thousand more people to keep Gaunt alive, maybe that was just her lovesickness talking, or perhaps, he was simply that good of a commisar.