#this human condition

The wind that soughs through the pine boughs above is quiet and icy with winter’s death, carrying with it portentous gray clouds that herald a fierce blizzard from the north. But even so, the air, as she draws closer to the marred remnants of the forest left in the skirmish’s wake, reeks of the heat of war.

The battle had been a violent one—that she had determined even before she arrives at its location, even before she comes upon the first splinters of shattered wood and corpses limp with the Reaper’s kiss still fresh on their tongues. It had broken out earlier in the afternoon, well within earshot of her campsite, and raged on for the better part of an hour before collapsing back into silence.

She had realized then, concealing herself in a tremulous crouch under the protection of a nearby thicket as she listened to the fight, that the soldiers and their war effort had drawn far too near to the wilderness that she now calls home. She has no desire to interact with the soldiers of her home country, much less those of the enemy, and she has done everything in her power to avoid them both since the invasion’s first bloodied dawn. Their proximity now will drive her where they dare not stray—further up the slopes of her neighbors the towering mountains, where the snow is deep and the wood is dense, and winter’s cruel grip with altitude combined freezes the unprepared down to the bone.

Once, perhaps at the start of the war, she might have been terrified at the prospect; a season ago, perhaps, her entire being would have been alight with the flame of a primal fury. Now, she finds the effort of emotion far too exhausting to feel much of anything at all. This is the way that she has chosen to live these years of her life; it will do her no good to mourn what could have been.

The snow that lay beneath what was once (she discerns to be) the thick of the skirmish has been stripped to its thinnest lower layers, uneven and melted in patches where it had been blasted into vapor by hand grenades. What snow does remain is sullied with black soot and dark earth, and sprays of pinks and rich reds where the combatants’ lives had been spilled. There are trees, too, that had fallen victim to the gunfire and the explosions—a few felled, some with wounds that will not heal, and many more with grazing scars.

And then, of course, there are the bodies themselves.

The first that she encounters is that of a young man, surely not many years her senior, struck down in his steps by a bullet to the neck. His jugular had been severed immediately, if the mangled pulp that remains is anything to go by, and the uneven spurts of dark cherry staining the snow around his slack-jawed face. He lies softly near the base of a fir, the onset of rigor mortis delayed by temperatures that struggle to crest the freezing point; his expression is pale and gentle beneath the greyed cloak of eternal slumber, as if merely napping for a little while on the forest floor.

He had been a fortunate one, even in death; his blood had drained swiftly, and his suffering had not been prolonged.

From him she takes his pack and most of its contents, his rifle and pistol, the canteen at his hip, and his knife. Even minus the weight of the night vision gear and his extra clothes, it’s an incredibly heavy load to bear, and she knows that the trek back to her campsite, then onward into the mountains beyond, will be long and arduous.

She doesn’t bother to check the name engraved into his dog tags—his is not the first human corpse she has encountered, but she still finds it easier for him to remain nameless, a pawn of the war rather than a human being who had once been loved, who had harbored secrets and scars and dreams, and had once lived a life not so unlike her own.

Many of the others, on both sides of the battle, have sustained similar injuries, strewn carelessly about the area in their varying final positions—one of the enemy, dead of a starburst hole that had shattered upward through the bone of his cheek and pulverized his brain in its skull; another of her home country, felled by a round that had all but minced his knee and sent homeward by another that left ground meat and splintered bone where his nose had once been; another of the enemy, one of the few women that had been present, bled out from an injury that had severed her brachial artery. Some attempt had been made to save her, judging from the hastily-tied tourniquet above the wound, but it’s evident now that it had been in vain. She sits slumped against a tree, head cocked, coal-black eyes glazed, and coal-black hair dull against once-warm skin now paled in the pallor of death.

There are those, too, who had fallen victim to the grenades, but she does not linger long over the bloodied scraps that are left of them, their strewn limbs and broken teeth, their tattered organs and mutilated expressions. There is not much of use to be salvaged from their remains, anyway, that had survived the explosions any less scathed than they themselves had.

The casualties suffered by both sides look to be roughly equal in number, and it’s impossible, picking through the mostly-intact corpses that remain to pilfer their ammunition and warmers and freeze-dried rations, to tell what the outcome of the battle had been. Neither of the units, for whatever reasons, has yet returned to collect their dead or its bounty; perhaps, she muses, they will wait until the blizzard has passed, and the memory of battle has been forgiven by the purity of a fresh layer of snow. They will certainly notice the missing ammunition and food packs—the disappearance of the one’s rucksack and weaponry even more so—but she will have long since departed for the mountains, and with the blizzard’s blind fury to cover her tracks in the coming hours, she doubts they will bother with the effort of pursuit.

The clouds have grown heavy above, dark with ice and malice through the gaps in the forest’s canopy, by the time she is prepared for the journey back, donned in the spare thermal garments of the woman with the tourniquet, and rucksack stuffed with rations and ammunition and warming packs in the space left by the first soldier’s discarded extra clothes and personal belongings. Far too much time has passed, and far too much blood has been shed, for guilt to prick at her numbed spirit in any meaningful capacity. The best that she can offer the soldiers and their fruitless sacrifices now is to hesitate at the edge of the skirmish’s fresh scar, to allow her gaze to linger on the butchered corpse of a man fallen prey to the indiscriminate spray of a hand grenade, and pray that death had not tarried too long in collecting his soul.

It is then, as she turns her back to this memory and sets her face towards the great mountains ahead, that the wind stills in the treetops, just for the briefest of moments, and the unmistakable sound of a man’s cough reaches her ears across the silent snow.

It’s a feeble, burbling thing, and it has her spinning on her heel in a skipped heartbeat, scanning the surrounding trees, all senses on blade’s edge, for approaching men—soldiers, doubtless, who would give chase if she fled and fire without question should they catch sight of her weapon. But there are no men to be seen, no dark figures to blend with the shadows of the forest in petrifying ripples of dim color. She remains alone in the wood as she had been before, her only companions the trees and the whispered secrets they share with the breeze in the canopy...and the mysterious cough, from the gully that runs along one edge of the battlefield.

The weakness conveyed in the cough, the startling wetness at its core, is the sole factor that sends her pressing forward to the gully’s brim in cool curiosity, nearly stumbling beneath the incredible weight of the pack across her shoulders. She doesn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all, at first, gaze skimming along the length of the icy rocks that lie where the stream flows during the warmer seasons. Perhaps solitude has driven her mad at last, she thinks dully, and the “cough” was simply the first of many auditory hallucinations to come.

But then a splash of inky crimson snags in the corner of her vision, unnatural amidst the greys and whites and browns of winter. It smears down the slope several paces from her position on the gully’s rim, strikingly vibrant against the trail of disturbed rocks and snow it follows, and ends in dark patches beneath a figure that lies supine at the edge of the frozen creek bed—a man, one of her home country’s soldiers.

He is gravely injured, it’s apparent, even before she scrambles gracelessly down the slope and makes her way to his stilling form. His breaths have been reduced to shallow gasps, despairing bids for oxygen around the pointed wood chip, roughly the size of a small Bowie knife, buried deep and with extraordinary force into the side of his neck. One leg rests at an unnatural angle against the rocks, bent at the shin, where something sharp protrudes against the cloth of his pant leg with a deep and sopping scarlet stain. Half of his face lies in bloody tatters below his helmet, peppered with fragments of wood that trail havoc past the shard in his neck to tarnish his uniform with reddened blotches along his arm and side.

He doesn’t shift to look at her as she abandons her rucksack to kneel at his less scathed side, only watches her movements with a single green eye, the one not bloodied and swollen shut amidst ribbons of pink flesh. His brow creases above it—in fear, or surprise, or perhaps a silent plea; she cannot determine which—as she removes her thick gloves, setting them aside to gingerly unclip the strap below his chin and remove his helmet. His jaw reacts to hinge wider once she has finished, choking in ragged gasps of frigid air that ultimately send dark blood bubbling upwards to splash his teeth with a fresh coat of somber scarlet.

The others’ faces had been quick to blur in her mind’s eye even before she had looked away, sinking backwards to fade into abstract smears of color and distant emotion on the tapestry of her memories. But this soldier’s, this man’s, features burn starkly into her brain nearly as soon as she has settled into them—pale, pale skin, nearly as pale as the snow around him, warmed just faintly by the shadows of a golden undertone; high but gentle cheekbones balanced against a strong jawline, swollen and discolored even on the more recognizable half of his face with bruising and the barest whispers of frostbite; a bloodied but distinctly European nose, mangled by a messy gash through the cartilage that allows burbling air to whistle through; blued lips, neither exceptionally plush nor bare, parted in dying desperation and stained with wine-black streaks that trail to the earth below; vague traces of a caramel-colored beard still patchy with youth; a soft honey-brown crew cut not yet darkened with time.

Long, full lashes framing the one eye, dark but shallow, verdant with the murky greens of a watering hole beneath the forest’s summer canopy.

Her stomach marbles with a sudden and peculiar dread when his gaze latches onto hers—aching, desperate—and holds it there, unwavering except in his silent death throes as he searches her eyes’ darkest depths for...something, something that stubbornly eludes her grasp.

She knows this man’s face, she realizes all at once, and her gut drops away into a cold, faintly horrified void as the nebulous sense of dread solidifies into resigned familiarity. Her fingers tremble now in a terrible mockery of anticipation, stiff and flushed in the frozen air, as she moves to reach carefully into the warm space between his uniform and his chest. A shudder ripples through his muscles when her fingertips brush across his skin, skipping across his hollow breath as her hand closes around warm metal engraved with words that will confirm or deny what she already knows, deep down, to be true.

But the truth, in spite of expectation, burns no less than the lukewarm dog tags in her palm, and the letters of the name that is inscribed into them: Caeden Rack—formerly, and perhaps still more popularly, known to the masses as the internet superstar Kingwrap.

It’s a name that draws her back, on a rush of air and memory, to a different time—a better time, a time before the war, when she had been trapped in the depths of a black and torpid mire. Caeden had been a distraction for her, back then, a voice on a screen that had deadened her senses with a charisma and nonchalant charm that had seduced millions before her, and many more after. He had made it easy, with the affable candor projected by his persona, for her imagination to craft a sort of relationship with him, a man whose features were for months an attractive invention his anonymity forced her mind to create. But even after he had made the decision to bare his face to the world, even after she saw it not to the standards of her mind’s particular whims, the bud of a dull, parasocial love for him had remained in the pit of her gut. Not one of his videos, prior to the start of the war, had been left unwatched.

He had vanished with hardly a trace from the face of the internet, she remembers, not long after war had been declared, and the draft had been announced. The prevailing theory at the time was that he had disappeared to dodge the draft, though she and others like her (correctly, she can now see) suspected that he had left to join the war effort. Some even surmised that he had perhaps met a similar fate as a fellow creator across the pond, a man the internet knew primarily as Oliver Tryst, who had buckled beneath the enormous stresses of his country’s draft and hung himself from a bridge in London.

His disappearance had pitched her downward into an embarrassingly deep depression, thickened further in the beginning months by the media’s unabating coverage of the war, but she had learned to harden herself and come to accept, eventually, that if he returned at all, he would never again be the man he once was. Kingwrap, and Caeden Rack as the world knew him, she told herself and any other person obstinately naïve enough to argue otherwise, was gone.

But she realizes now, watching the life of a man she once thought she might have loved ebb in labored throbs from his veins, that she has not accepted much of anything at all.

“Oh, God,” she whispers above him.

Something in her chest fractures then, with a snap that reverberates in perfect silence through her consciousness, and her breast splits open, pouring forth with everything, every emotion, that she has ever dared to freeze out—blistering rage against the coal-haired army from the west, crippling fear of the war’s outcome, the inexorable heartache of solitude, and grief, so much grief, over losses she has never suffered herself to mourn.

Her vision blurs in the deluge’s wake, swimming with the burn of liquid salt that swirls Caeden into the snow and rock around him, smudges of browns and grays and shocks of red. A sob swells to fill her windpipe, and she nearly chokes on the effort of suppressing it until it slips from her lips with a stilted jerk of her shoulders, liberating those behind it to flow unimpeded.

For a long moment, he simply watches her weep over him with a profound sorrow that, she imagines from his perspective, seems far wetter than it has any right to be from a perfect stranger such as herself. It is only the unexpected touch on her wrist, mild but urgent, that pulls her from the troughs of her own despair, guiding her gaze back to his with words unsaid and the mere brush of his presence as she blinks away the fog of tears.

His proverbial hold is firmer now, an aching vice grip of a desperate tenacity belied by the singleness of his eye, boring muddy moss green into hers with what had never been a search at all, but a request—a message that had been distorted, before, through a façade of chilled apathy and the boiling knot of putrified emotions it had concealed. But now it rings loud even in its intangibility, clearer than spoken words:

Kill me, he implores with all that is left in him, and it echoes around her, in the wind that moans through the trees, the crease in his brow and the tremble stuttering through his gasps, the sheen that spreads across his faltering gaze. Please.

Shock rushes out the tide of all coherent thought, leaving her mind light and empty, air stagnant in her lungs, as she stares down at him in stupefied silence. The first thing to follow feels small and hollow, dwarfed by the impossible magnitude of what he is asking of her—and then the tide is sweeping back in again, tainted black with bitter guilt at the realization that she cannot find within herself the fortitude to end his suffering.

Her conscience bristles, a painful prickling sensation deep below her sternum, as she breaks away from his silent pleas, eyes stinging with the threat of fresh tears as she scans the forest bleakly. It would take little effort to grant him his rest, especially considering the severity of his injuries—a targeted slash across the throat, or a round fired square through the center of his forehead, would emancipate him in seconds from the shackles of his torment and soothe her smarting conscience. But grief, or one of its more panicked cousins, coils itself tight around her spine, and she remains petrified on the spot.

Fury and frustration mixed blaze across her nerves, then, justice crowing in indignation at the root of her hesitance to kill him—it isn’t borne of a coward’s grief, after all; she has hunted for food before, birds and rabbits and deer that had certainly deserved death no more than any human male. Her grief is a selfish grief—only in part for Caeden himself, and mostly for the loss his imminent death represents to her personally. Grief for an innocence lost forevermore, a version of herself that will remain tethered to him in his grave even if the war is won. Grief for the knowledge that a world shattered cannot be rebuilt the same as it once was. Grief for a time long past, when though her life had been directionless and depressed, the world had been safe and comfortable, and so had she.

Everything seems to have happened so quickly, all of a sudden. She just wants a bit more time to release it all, to bid it a proper farewell before it is swallowed whole by the sands of time.

Compassion and selfishness war in equal halves within, meeting with all the ruinous and uncompromising power of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Their gravity pulls at her mind with unyielding strength matched perfectly, swaying her neither right nor left, and she realizes then that she cannot choose the purely right course of action, but neither can she choose the wrong.

So she chooses neither at all, and takes the road that lies through the absolute middle, reaching across his body to grasp the wood embedded into his windpipe. It’s only then, in the moment that she hesitates, that she truly comprehends that he had suffered for hours prior to her arrival, since the skirmish’s final traded shots—alone, forgotten in the snow and the bitter air, drowning in the agony of injuries even she cannot see (dulled somewhat, she can only hope, by the onset of shock) and his own blood, trickling steadily down his trachea to fill his lungs. He doesn’t have long now; removing the wood chip won’t be nearly as humane as a bullet to the head or slash to the throat, but it will hasten the process of his death, and simultaneously lend her a bit more time to accept it.

I’m sorry, she whispers to him through silence borne solely of her own cowardice. Hot tears swell once more, spilling from her eyelids when his hand moves to find hers, sitting in her lap, and curls cold around it, squeezing as earnestly as he can muster. He avoids her gaze now, staring upward into the canopy above, relentless struggles for breath quickening as a single, crystalline drop slips from the corner of his eye to trail past his ear.

When, she wonders, securing her hold on the fragment, had she become such a terrible person?

And then suddenly, with a flex of the muscles in her arm, the wood chip has been torn from his neck, surface slightly soggy with a vivid coat of red, and decorated at the more jagged edges with shreds of flesh. His body jerks violently, a movement to arch his back that is abruptly aborted with a pained puff of air. He doesn’t cry out, not like she had expected he might, but she can still feel his scream reverberate in her bones, vibrating in her marrow through the bite of chilled cloth as his gloved hand clenches into the skin of hers, and the softly-keening whistle of oxygen lost to the wound in his windpipe. Palpable fear is swift to rush into the vacuum left in the wake of the initial jolt of pain, glossing his eye with a stricken gleam that fills nearly as quickly as it drains, and though his hold loosens marginally, he clings to her hand as if it is the fabric of his own life.

Aching empathy crackles like electricity across her diaphragm as she brings their joined hands up, pressing his knuckles flush against her lips, and reaches forward with the other to card her fingers through his honey-brown hair, cold but startlingly soft against her calluses. The sour taste of regret rises to rest on her tongue at the thought that this is the best she can offer him in his final moments—futile gestures of comfort that, no matter how tender, do not change the fact that a stranger’s face will be the last he sees, and that (oh, God) he is going to die.

But his lashes flutter at her touch, as if in the most tragic shade of gratitude, muscles slackening at the sensation of her fingertips skimming his scalp, then down across the least mangled contours of his face. An expression of such soft yearning comes over his features at the contact that emotion wells to fill her vision hardly before she can register the pinch of fresh grief in her gut, and though she wills herself to be strong for him, tears are leaking down her cheeks to soak into his glove before she even can begin to suppress them.

He is going to die. He is going to die.

Fate must have found it incredibly amusing to dictate that her first meeting with Caeden Rack was also to be her last, and though her vocal cords remain paralyzed beneath the weight of her emotions in their totality, she finds words rushing through her mind like the babbling of a brook—words that she has always wanted to say to him, conversations that had been carried out entirely within her fantasies. She had always liked to imagine bumping into him in the urban wilds, back then, the two of them serendipitously hitting it off with greetings exchanged and quips traded on a bright day in an imaginary future.

The words sift past closed lips now like his silken hair through her fingers, falling away into oblivion with the glistening splinters of her dreams, forever to remain unspoken.

It is only now, it occurs to her with a metallic twist of irony through the gut, that she truly recognizes Caeden as a human being—not a character in her fantasies, a myth, a legend, a disembodied personality trapped within a microphone thousands of miles away, but a human. A human, with a family and friends and loves come and gone, memories and mysteries and complexities all of his own. A human, who walks and talks, laughs even if he doesn’t mean it and cries in secret. A human, ephemeral as the morning vapor, with skin and bones and organs that bleed the same black cherry as her own.

A human who lies dying at her knees, mutilated by energies no man’s constitution could possibly endure, and clasps her hand with the unabashed fear of what is to come.

It’s a strangely surreal feeling, watching a person who had once seemed so close for all the distance between them fade, an ache that throbs colder than frostbite in tandem with every faltering gasp that passes his parted lips. But she cannot yield to it now, or grant it even the liberty to weigh on her features, not while Caeden bathes in blood and fear as he anxiously awaits his hour’s arrival, clutching her hand with all the strength that is left within him. He needs an anchor now, something to ground him as he departs—someone to be the strength that has long bled away, a terrible onus that compassion and the gnaw of guilt compel her to carry for him.

But the numb wall of jaded apathy is not strong now, not when Caeden had driven the point of his suffering straight through the permafrost to pierce the tender core of her heart. Her chest burns with the pressure of smothered empathy and all its companions as she sits with him in somber silence, watching his valiant endeavors for oxygen wither until all that is left to prop up his consciousness is the despairing fervor of his own spirit—regrets, perhaps, words he has always wanted to say, things he has always wanted to do, sights he has always wanted to see. And still, even on elastic minutes of borrowed time, even as he skims the surface of slumber’s midnight waters, still he struggles.

She brings his hand, trembling around hers, to rest against her forehead, closing her eyes as her breath quakes with the effort of staying strong, of being his rock—not as a fan, or a friend, or anything more, but simply a fellow human being. “Let go,” she whispers, against the raw howl of selfish grief that tears through her senses, and they are nearly the most painful words she has ever brought herself to speak—not only directed to him, but to herself, and to the part of her that clings to the past with the same stricken persistence that he clings to her hand. “Let go.”

His fingers shift, adjusting in her hold to grip her hand more securely, but she knows he understands what she meant.

It is quiet when he slips away—a bleeding exhale that does not rebound, the unnatural easing of the muscles in his hand—but it is the sudden and absolute absence of his presence that resonates the most within her, a solemn stillness so profound that the wind itself seems to die in the trees. His eye is glazed when she lowers his lifeless hand, fixed for eternity to some point amongst the pine boughs, pupil blown wide in a perfect blackness void of everything he had ever been.

Winter has never felt so bleak, and the teeming wood so wretchedly barren, as it does when the realization fully settles upon her that where two flames had once warmed each other, one remains alone, and the other shall never be relit for all the unburnt wax that remains.

She stays by his side for some time after he has passed, as if in wait for something that does not exist—some sign, perhaps, that he isn’t truly dead, something to ease the unexpectedly crushing weight of solitude. The forest has begun to dim when she gets to her feet at last, darkening steadily in the shade of the blizzard and the reign of night. Grief is quick to reclaim its throne in her throat when she takes Caeden by the feet to drag him up to the hill to lie amongst his fallen comrades, where his unit will be more likely to find him, and where his death will not forever be lost to the war. His family, at the least, deserves the same closure that she has been granted, of mourning his broken body.

The tears fall softly first, then in roiling torrents, soaking her cheeks and constricting her diaphragm with racking sobs the moment she hears his fractured shinbone push back through his skin, slipping into place with the traction her pull on his legs creates. His face remains perfectly frozen, forever set into that final expression, and though she knows that he can no longer feel the agony that had drowned him, though she knows he is dead, his utter lack of a reaction cuts into her with all the cruel abandon of the wood chip in his neck.

She cannot bring herself to linger for too long, once she has laid him to rest away from the gully’s brim at the top of the incline, and though she takes none of his equipment or supplies, her conscience aches at the thought of leaving him, as if he is still capable of taking comfort in her presence. But her mangled heart cannot bear the sight of his blued lips, his expression iced over, his vacant green eye, the life she had once lived, any longer than is absolutely necessary.

He is dead, after all. He’s gone.

The baleful sighs of wind have rather appropriately swelled into a tempestuous howl by the time she departs—a feeble imitation, for all the blizzard’s ire, of the maelstrom that rages in the confines of her ribcage as she stumbles off into the looming woods. Tears stream steadily down her cheeks well after she has left him behind, burning with the heat of his blood on her cheeks against the bite of the gale. Each memory of him that she has ever tucked away throbs in bruising pulses against her mind’s eye as she stumbles away into the endless wilderness—fond memories, of his crooked and curiously charming smile, the cocky ring to his voice, his unattractive and terribly contagious laugh, his cluster of small idiosyncrasies.

Things that she, and everyone else, should have cherished, because they had been what made him human. Little things that are forever lost to history, crystallized beneath ice far colder and deeper than anything on this Earth could fathom.

Guilt spins end over end in its tussle with sorrow, twisting and stretching to intertwine with fury and fear and everything that has been disturbed by the hurricane that rages through the cavity in her chest. The chaos of emotions she cannot even begin to identify crashes against bone and muscle, and she staggers beneath the combined onus of their gravity and the weight of the pack across her shoulders, energy sapping from her knees unexpectedly to trail down her calves and blacken the snow with the memory of Caeden’s blood.

In the snow and the gale, amidst the first flakes that have begun to sting the Earth in the settling darkness, her final image of him burns on her cortex, as bright and hot as he once had: his corpse, empty and light for how heavy he had been, lying utterly lifeless in the battlefield’s center, pale and cold and glazed beneath a thick but invisible cloak, face smothered in a strange, resigned peace. She shuts her eyes against it, but it remains undimmed, and for all her efforts, the phantom of a repressed cry shudders through even the most sheltered depths of her spirit.