Work Text:
They say ghosts are usually paranormal.
Non-existent.
Pseudoscience.
But I have seen more than enough to know that isn't really true.
I was a soldier during WW1, serving in the Belgian army. I was 20 years old, and desired to study engineering. My younger brother, Jacques, 2 years my junior, decided to follow me. Maurice was still too young, just a boy, so he stayed at home. Jacques and I were younger then.
More naive.
More likely to wholeheartedly believe in the goodness of humanity.
Between being a boy and being a man.
We were under the impression that this would be all a great adventure.
That this war of the world would be over soon.
How.
Wrong.
We.
Were.
The Germans.
They had weapons unlike anything we had seen before.
It was a lime-green ghost, silent but deadly.
Drifting silently through the air, guided only by the wind. The only sound made were the howls of death left in its wake.
Et mon dieu!
La façon dont ils sont morts!
Screams of horror followed these silent ghosts of death.
"Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?"
"S'il vous plaît aidez-moi!"
"Je ne veux pas mourir!"
Their eyes bulging, desperately, fervently, trying to get that green ghost out of their skin. Like it was a parasite, a bug, crawling under their flesh, gnawing at them incessantly.
And then silence.
And after returning from the war, I threw myself into my studies of physics. Abandonded was engineering, because in my future, I did not want others to inherit the horrors I had experienced.
I never wanted to make a weapon like that.
Equations, the stars and the universe seemed a comfort compared to the darkest of dark potential of engineering.
Bear I could not to talk about whatever happened there.
For the ghost of the dead had haunted me still, of fallen comrades, of enemies killed by our hands, but not by our choice. I could just vaguely see them out of the corner of my eyes.
And though Jacques and I came out alive, we were in limbo between life and death itself. We were alive in body, but not in spirit, for a part of us had been left there. In the battlefield, with all the other fallen soldiers. It seemed like the world had moved on, without caring about the horrors of war eyes had seen.
Perhaps that was why I was introduced to the young Albert.
A mere 14 years old, a boy, but with a shock of white hair and a brilliance much like the man he was cloned after. But different, he was from the man I called a friend.
The boy, Albert, seemed troubled by things youth of his age wouldn't usually be unsettled like. For one, he struggled with having to live up to his namesake. Honnêtement, they are being a bit too harsh on him.
He was just a boy. And more importantly, he was his own person.
He was not Einstein, for he was just Albert. A person who is worthy of existing just as he is, as God intended him to be.
But there was something else about him that we found kinship in.
For he was haunted too. Not by the ghosts of dead soldiers at his hands, non. But the ghost of someone he loved dearly, by his hands, but not by his choice.
Isaac.
I knew he never intended to kill him.
He had wanted to protect Isaac, the one he loved so dearly.
But yet, it seemed, death had reached him first.
And the way the others treated him?
Brushing off the ghost of Isaac as if he never mattered to Albert? Telling him to move on from his death, as if he wasn't a traumatised child in need of comfort? Dismissing the nightmares of death, as if this was something so ubiquitous it's almost boring?
It was disgusting.
Perhaps that was why I had such a close bond with him.
It seemed as if the two of us, alone, had seen death haunting, felt it lurk over our shoulders. Trauma had been burdened onto us, and yet, not a soul was willing to help carry it.
They say ghosts are not real.
But why, oh please tell me why, did we feel them haunt our minds still?