Cade #3
“At all?”
“No. Has your reaction changed?”
I remembered how I’d stood there, towering over him and roasting him over the coals of my fury and frustration, and had demanded an answer to that same question.
There had been a sense of accomplishment, of victory, when he had bowed his head with a troubled look in his eyes.
Here was a soldier who had been on my team for just shy of two months, and I thought he had finally understood that what he had done was stupid, impulsive, and dangerous to the rest of us.
I had thought he finally understood the stakes he was playing with, and would finally fall into line.
And then he had picked his head up, and I could see from the hard look in his eyes that victory was far from my grasp, even before he had spoken.
“To be a soldier is to accept death, our deaths. But I won’t make others pay that price.”
It had been like a slap in the face because he wasn’t backing down, and because it was like facing down the reality of what we were, of what we did, and of what could happen to us. I still remembered what I had said and the easy grace with which he’d accepted my rebuke.
“You’re a terrible soldier,” I echoed my past self and then chuckled. “I guess that was as true then as it is now, ain’t it?”
He smiled. “I guess I was, and I am. Maybe I should have never enlisted, but I thought…I thought I was going to be doing something good in the world. But then reality set in, and I realized all I was doing was just…I was just another cog in the machine. And then that family—”
I closed my eyes, but it couldn’t block the memory of coming back through that village a few days later to ensure everything was calm again.
The family he had risked his life, our team’s lives for, had been heaped in a pile along with others.
We never got the answer to why those specific people had been killed, but we suspected.
Walker’s act of mercy and compassion had inevitably doomed them, and the realization had been…
ugly. It had taken a few of us to hold Walker back when the person overseeing the ‘burial’ had sneered and told us that accidents happened, especially when you were stupid enough to accept help when death was preferable.
It was the only time I’d ever seen Walker lose all self-control and composure.
It was as if a wild animal inside him had been released, and we’d been forced not just to pin him to the ground, but to drag him away in zip ties.
If we hadn’t stopped him, I was sure Walker would have burned half that village to the ground.
Maybe they deserved it, but Walker didn’t deserve to live with that on his conscience along with everything else.
“I want to say that war makes monsters out of men, but that feels like an excuse,” he said softly, staring up at the ceiling distantly. “I think the monster is always there, in all of us. All it needs is an excuse to come out; war is one of the easiest excuses.”
I wasn’t sure how we had gone from me going through my first bottoming experience to the horrors of war and being soldiers, but there we were. “They weren’t your fault.”
“I know…or at least I’ve always known in my head that it wasn’t my fault,” he said, closing his eyes.
“I wasn’t the one who killed them. I wasn’t the one who decided a suffering family in need of help deserved to die because I chose to help them.
And it took me a long time to understand that.
In a lot of ways, it wasn’t my fault that I was there.
I had been lied to, had been told that this was the better way, that I could do something worthwhile there.
And they, even the ones who chose to murder that poor family, had been told they were doing the right thing.
There is nothing more monstrous than someone who does evil in the name of good. ”
“You’ve done a lot more thinkin’ on this than I ever did,” I said quietly, and when he glanced at me with his gaze sharp, I realized how that sounded.
“Naw, it’s not a bad thing. I mean, I don’t think it is…
but maybe it would’ve been easier on you if ya hadn’t thought so much about it.
I never thought about it too much. Wish I could say I had to try not to think about it, but that’s not true.
Back then, all that mattered was gettin’ shit done like we were supposed to, and gettin’ all of us back in one piece. ”
“And that’s all you ever needed to be,” he said softly, reaching up and brushing hair off my forehead.
“That’s what you were, who you were, Cade.
You don’t have to be some overthinking idiot like me.
I kind of wish sometimes it could have been like that for me, but my brain has never let me have that kind of…
I don’t want to say peace, but that simplicity you’re so good at sounds peaceful. ”
“Just makes me one of those cogs ya were talkin’ about.”
“I was just as much a cog as you were, Cade. A cog who knows they’re a cog isn’t any happier than a cog that doesn’t realize it because he’s got a personal mission.”
“One I failed at, I didn’t save any of ya.”
“And I didn’t change anything. I’m right back to being under the thumb of the very machine I was trying to thwart.”
When he put it like that, it was easier to see how he had become so bitter and angry. “That’s why ya are the way ya are…ain’t it?”
“Bitchy and mean?” he asked with a laugh. “Yeah, well, I guess there’s some truth to that. For all that I tried to do differently, to change something. I’ve ended up back in the machine, bowing my head like a good little boy.”
“Hey,” I said roughly, gripping his jaw tightly. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with doin’ things for the people ya care about, alright? Ya didn’t fail ’cause ya care for your family, Walker. Love isn’t a failing.”
“I’ve told myself that every day,” he said, closing his eyes. “Hasn’t made it any better.”
“Do you regret it?”
“What?”
“Suckin’ it up to protect your family.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Really?” I asked, knowing damn well I was poking the sleeping dragon in the eye, but something told me I needed to. “It sounds like ya do. Sounds like you’re upset that ya gave up your crusade just to keep your family safe and you’re mad at ’em for it.”
“I am not mad at them,” he snarled, and I grunted when that surprisingly hidden strength of his came out, and when he shoved me and scrambled back to glare at me as he hunched next to the bed.
“I’m mad at the fuckers who created the very situation I’m stuck in.
I’m helpless to do anything but their bidding because I have the ‘audacity’ to care about people, and that can be used against me.
I’m mad because I can’t make that stop, and that sometimes I wish I didn’t care so I could keep going after the bastards, keep putting on the pressure. ”
“But you can’t, can ya?” I asked, not caring that I was probably going to have a new bruise from how hard he had launched me away. “Ya still care. Ya still want to care.”
“Yeah, fine, okay?” he snapped, snatching the blanket from the bed and wrapping it around himself as if that was going to create a barrier between us when his issue wasn’t because his dick was hanging out.
“I want to care, I still need to care, okay? And now I’m also realizing that you are added to that list of people I care about, that I have to worry about.
So fuck you, and fuck everything that you think you’re being clever with right now! ”
“I’m not tryin’ to be clever or smart or anythin’ like that,” I told him softly as I reached out, knowing it was a risk but knowing it needed to be done.
He might think he wasn’t the sort of person who responded to being touched, but I knew differently.
Maybe it had taken me sleeping with him to understand it, but I could see the loneliness in him, the way he had separated himself from other people for whatever reason.
My family had never been afraid of showing their love physically, and I had picked that up naturally.
Somewhere along the way, it made sense, and I followed through on it.
But maybe he had never been given the chance to understand that about him.
But I had seen the way he relaxed when I touched him, the way he sighed in contentment when he nuzzled against me in the dark, and the way he smiled when I ran my fingers through his hair.
He didn’t stop me as my hand closed around his arm and my thumb stroked his skin.
“Ya care, Walker. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with carin’, okay?
That’s what I’m tryin’ to say right now.
Ya aren’t a good soldier, not like we were expected to be, but ya are still willin’ to fight.
But ya realized the cost of fightin’ and decided it wasn’t worth it. Ya didn’t fail, ya chose love.”
He bowed his head, staring down at where my hand was wrapped around his arm, and closed his eyes. “Sometimes…sometimes I think it would have been easier if I had been there with the rest of you. If I had been there and done the stupid shit I always did—”
“And died with ’em?” I asked softly.
“Yes,” he rasped after a moment of silence.
I wanted to tell him that then he wouldn’t be here with me now, that I wouldn’t have discovered so much more about myself.
That without him here, I would be the loneliest creature to walk the planet because right now, I had someone who understood what it meant to be one of us, to hurt and ache because you were the last of your kind.
That when it came down to it, I was selfish enough to want him to live, so I didn’t have to be alone anymore.
“Me too,” I said instead, because it was just as true as everything I wasn’t saying. “But we weren’t, and we’re here…aren’t we?”
“We are,” he said in a tired voice. “God save us, we’re still here.”
“Broken, hurting, bitter, and lost,” I said, cupping his face gently. “But we’re here, that’s gotta mean somethin’, don’t it?”
“It means we’re here,” he said bitterly. “There’s no fate or luck or divine intervention; we’re just here…coincidence.”
“Don’t mean we can’t make it mean somethin’, does it?” I asked.
His eyes flashed open, and he stared at me in shock. “What?”
“We’re soldiers. I was a good one, maybe even perfect. An’ you were…well, a bad one,” I said, smiling when he gave a choked laugh. “But we’re here. Maybe it was God, maybe it was fate, maybe it was luck, or maybe it was just coincidence…but we’re here. The best thing is…the best we can do, right?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be lost and confused and hurting? Aren’t you here because you can’t get better?” he asked, but there was no judgement in his voice, only hope and desperation.
“I was, but I guess meetin’ you again made me see shit differently,” I said with a chuckle, pulling him close and wrapping him up in my arms. Never was I more glad it had been a leg rather than an arm I’d lost than right then, as I could wrap him in a tight hold.
“All we got is right now, and maybe right now it’s just us, the two of us but—”
“There’s others,” he said softly. “Like Clay and even Isaac, for you.”
“And your sister and your, uh, nieces?”
“Niece and nephew. I’m so scared for her.”
“Your sister or your niece?”
“My niece. I don’t know how it’s possible when she’s not even my kid, but I see so much of myself in her.
She’s going to be a problem. For herself and other people.
She’s only eight, and she’s already got all these ideas, and she doesn’t like seeing things not go the way she thinks they should.
She’s got such a sense of right and wrong, and she’s got one hell of a temper. ”
“Hmm, yeah, I can see how you can see the similarities.”
“Fuck off,” he said with a laugh, but he burrowed into my chest. “Fuck you.”
“Ya already did,” I said, and then frowned. “Which I ain’t against, by the way, but—”
“But you prefer to do the fucking.”
“Is it wrong to say yeah?”
“No,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s never wrong to want what you want, Cade. Not with us anyway…I hope.”
I want you.
That’s what I wanted to say.
But I didn’t.
“Good,” I said instead, feeling like a coward as I held him close. “Then maybe right now is a good time to admit that I want some food.”
His laugh was a little fragile, but it was still pure in its mirth. “God, top or bottom, your first thought is food, isn’t it?”
“I’m hungry!” I protested with a pout.
“You’re such a man,” he said affectionately. “Come on, you, let’s get some food in that belly.”
I didn’t know if it was a fix for the problem, but at least I had him smiling again.
That had to count for something.