The Children Suffer Most

[alterimpulse]

A fic with an original character inspired by how even what seems to be justice can be unjust. In war, it’s always the children that do least harm and suffer worst harm. The fall of Etrenank, from the perspective of a child caught up in it. First person POV gen sad story.

AO3 LINK: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17188466


 

I sat there in the dim light of a survival tent, and clicked together the final piece of the minigear model together once more, then took it apart once again - to take it apart and put it back together calmed me in some way, even if it was the only possession I had left from my clothes and a moneycard.

Four days ago, it had been my tenth birthday. I had begged to buy the model - scale Vendetta - because I had idolized General Ramsus from the first day I had seen him on Homevision. He seemed so strong yet so kind, and that was the moment I decided I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up. Mother and Father could not have been more proud - they already spoke, since last year, of how they would be sure to find me a sponsor and enroll me in Jugend at thirteen so I could be just like him. Just like the man who fought to protect Heaven.

And of course, I wanted this model of his war machine, given to him by the Emperor himself. He seemed kind of weird, but he was cool in his own way, God’s man in a machine that gave him life to guide and teach us so we would be better than the Lambs.

I clicked the final piece together and wondered where both of them must have been four days ago. When I walked out of the toy shop on Arbot Plaza with Mother and my dog - a white poodle, Abnath - and the sirens blared, but that normally happened at the end of the week.

This was the third day, and I wondered why they were making so much noise, why every one of the Homevision screens was red with a picture of a mushroom in back of a static image of the Emperor. Why people were screaming, and running. I had never seen anything like that, and then Mother threw Abnath’s leash down and grabbed me in her arms as she, too, ran.

That was when I felt truly afraid: I knew something was wrong, though I didn’t know what. Only that everyone was scared, and I should probably be too.

She had looked at me then and sat me down. “If we fall, it is under the house! Get into it! The door in the floor under the rug! I have to go find your little sister at school!”

I obeyed - who wouldn’t, obedience was one of the Ten Ultimate Virtues - and the moment I arrived at the gate to our home, still holding the box of my new toy, was when the first explosion happened. Of course I’d seen lots of explosions on Homevision in the war movies I’d began to watch, but this...I had never felt anything like it before as the entire world around me seemed to shake, and I looked behind me, below me, to see nothing but open sky and cloud layer.

I knew Mother was gone. That Abnath was gone. I wasn’t sure if my father or Sharla were safe or if they too had been, but all I knew was that I needed to throw that rug aside and climb into the space below.

The moment I slammed the shelter door behind me was when I heard and felt two more blasts, and I admit I was crying. I sat there and waited, wondering what my next life would be, and then I felt as if I were spinning in a free fall descent, and looked out a side panel that had opened.

I was falling. Through the cloud layer, through the sky, and then the fall stopped and I was thrown against the wall and felt sharp pain with a loud snap, worse than any I had felt before, from both legs as I had been standing.

The woman who found me, one not much older than Sharla, dressed in an upper class Jugend uniform, she told me I had been in an emergency capsule, and that was why I was alive, with two broken legs, but alive. That those of us who got into the capsules had lived.

But no one else had.

That the only place we had known, Heaven itself, had been torn apart.

I asked her why, how could this have happened, and she had no answer but to hold me as I cried. She said she would protect me until my legs healed, and now she sat next to me sleeping - I could not sleep. Any time I closed my eyes, I saw the blast. Saw the red screens, heard the screams. Thought of Mother, of Father, of Sharla, of Abnath. Wondered why the Emperor and the Guardian Angel and General Ramsus had not been able to save us.

And I cried again and again, and this time, left the minigear in pieces as I sobbed. Even it, my last piece of home, did nothing to help me anymore.