“I lost my left foot and my best friend on the same day and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt in my tiny little mind which one hurt me most.”He tapped the knee, as though he could feel the plasteel and honeycombed alloy inside of it. “I made a mistake. I loved someone. I started loving him when I was too young to know the folly of it, the futility of it in the face of what we were both destined to become. The sharp end of the bayonet. Well, that sharp end loses bits when it strikes something harder than itself and strike we did… and lose we did. Lose I did.”He took a drag of Lho to steady his humors. “I chose to keep loving him when I was old enough to know better because I thought it wouldn’t happen to us. That he would keep on living, that that he was strong enough and if he wasn’t I could protect him, we could protect him. RAED and I. That our little family was the only thing this galaxy couldn’t take away from us.”He bit the inside of his cheek until it bled, and swallowed back the emanation.“But I was wrong. The only thing the galaxy can’t take away from you is a pain so profound, and so deep that no amount of Lho Sticks, Tranq, and rotgut trench liquor can make it go away. Ever. And an emptiness that can never be filled in your foolish little heart because no one will be shaped like he was. My first love. My brother. My best friend.” Tiny tremors had overtaken his hands, and he balled them into fists, slamming them down on his knees.“So I suppose, the thing too great to sacrifice again, would be someone I was silly enough to love. Or maybe… the thing too great to sacrifice would be the distance I’ve built between myself and everyone else in this frakking world, my carefully cultivated dissociation from all that lives and breathes!”There was a barely stifled sob, bitten back, literally, with his teeth snapping together with an audible clack. His fist burrowing deep into the joint where his augmentic met his skin, regaining composure through pain.
There was blood on the filter of his Lho stick, and a hardness in his eyes, like the edges of monoblades… betrayed by the thin trickles of tears which wandered down his pale and battered features. (@raedinthemunitorum)
