Weekly Drabble #279: Memories (Patreon)

"What would it look like if you were to make a children's animated cartoon?" someone once asked me.

This is what that would look like.

The prompt for this week is "remembering is an elusive shadow" from Johnny.

~

Memories:

“I’m not arguing about this with you any more,” Jacob snapped, slamming his journal shut as he glared at his companion across the fire. “I know what happened. Whatever you think happened on Triegin didn’t. They brainwashed you.”

His prisoner-slash-travelling companion glared right back with off-blue eyes the same colour as his own, a hue rare among the disparate branches of humanity, but once common to the residents of Triegin. Now, it was only seen in the handful who’d been offworld during the Burning and Jacob himself, who’d thought he’d been the sole survivor of the slaughter that had wiped out his entire colony. He’d never expected to see those same colour eyes again from anyone his own age, certainly not wearing the uniform of the people who’d massacred Triegin.

“The only one brainwashed here is you, Jakie.” Ashley Kallos gestured with the stump of her right arm like a prosecutor’s indictment. It, like her left, ended at the elbow, just as her legs ended at the knees. She’d lost those limbs, she said, during the Burning. She had prosthetics, but he’d had to cut her out of them, leaving her suit of power armour thirty kilometers away at the crash site of her downed ship.

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped. No one called him ‘Jakie’. No one but his sister and his childhood friends, and all of them had been dead for fifteen years, killed at the hands of people like Praetor Kallos

Gold Squad had never known Ashley as anything other than one of the emergent Malcorran Dominion’s enforcers, one of a select few that carried out the Underlords’ will. In her heavy, bulky Dread armour and its low, guttural speech, none of the pilot-commandos had ever suspected that its operator had been a young woman only two years older than Jacob himself, the ‘baby’ of the unit. Jacob himself had only learned the truth two days ago.

In her armour, Ashe was terrifying. He’d seen her rip a shuttle’s doors off, tear her way through security bulkheads and carry weapons that were usually mounted on armoured vehicles. She’d been a nigh-unstoppable force of nature that Gold’s best tactics and weapons had only ever been able to slow. When he’d found the smoking wreckage of her ship and climbed into the cockpit to find one of the people that had destroyed his home completely helpless, he’d wanted to look them in the eyes when he killed them. He wanted them to see one of the survivors of the Burning and understand the reason whythey were going to die.

He’d never expected to find eyes like his under that cruel helmet, eyes that stared back at him with just as much hatred as he felt, nor hear a young woman’s voice instead of the harsh growl he’d come to expect. “What are you waiting for?” she’d demanded. He’d never expected to find one of his own in the Dominion’s service and he’d been caught entirely flat-footed.

They’d argued, spitting anger at each other until Jacob noticed the fire was about to reach the shuttle’s fuel tanks and he’d realized he didn’t want to see anyone, even a member of the Dominion, die like this.

Jacob told her to get out of the armour, that they could keep bickering and try to kill each other later. She refused. He thought it was pride, or suspicion that if she did, he’d kill her like he’d first intended. The same strange energy pulse that had brought down his fighter and her shuttle had fried her armour, but it should still have had a manual emergency release. It took him longer than it should to realize that the reason she wasn’t getting out of her armour was that she couldn’t.

She spat hatred at him as he hurriedly cut through that thick plate inch by inch as the fire drew closer to the volatile thruster fuel. He’d thought she was injured and her pride wouldn’t let her show weakness, even if it killed her. He’d been right about the first thing, though he hadn’t known how much. The second...  he refused to abandon her despite her scathing vitriol, but he wouldn’t be able to cut her loose before the shuttle went up in flames. Finally, she’d unlocked her armour and as he’d pried away layers of plating and synthetic armature, he’d seen why she hadn’t been able to get out. Her arms and legs ended at knees and elbows. With her gear completely shut down, she’d been trapped inside her suit.

He’d carried Kallos out of the wreck, alongside whatever scraps of gear he could salvage. At first, she’d been an extremely hostile prisoner. He’d told himself that’s all she was and why he’d worked so hard to save her. She was the highest-ranking member of the Dominion the Alliance had captured in a generation. He’d put her on his back like a child in a papoose (it hadn’t done much for her attitude, but there were only so many ways he could carry someone, and he’d suspected she’d be perfectly willing to bite him if she got the chance) and started walking across the tundra. There was even less left of his fighter than her shuttle, so he headed towards the covert Alliance listening post on this nameless wasteland. From there, he could contact his people and they could be rescued.

It hadn’t been easy. Beyond this arid equatorial region, the planet was locked in the grip of an ice age. The terrain was unforgiving and the wildlife was hungry, even willing to pursue completely foreign organisms like humans. The company hadn’t been all that pleasant. Ashe – or Praetor Kallos as she preferred, referring to him only as Lieutenant Holt – was not the most personable travelling companion. If she wasn’t sullenly silent, she was acerbic and hostile and if not that, then she only recited her name, rank and serial number.

At night on the second day, it came to a head and Jacob finally exploded. “Why do you do it?” he demanded when he sat down to eat. Feeding her, her hostile Triegin eyes glaring at him the whole time, not even offering a word of thanks for saving her life was too much. He didn’t even get a single mouthful of ration pack-soup to his mouth before all the resentment and anger boiled over. “Why are you fighting for the people that wiped out our home? How can you do that?”

“Funny,” she replied. “I was wondering the same thing about you.”

“About... about me?” Jacob blinked in consternation, his brain briefly locking up. “The Dominion wiped out our home! A million people were exterminated like bugs just for being on the wrong side of an imaginary line! The Alliance were the ones that saved me!” His voice shook and he rose to his feet, holding up his journal. He’d kept it since he’d been rescued, writing in it every day, chronicling his thoughts and experiences. It was a litany of everything he’d lost and everything he’d gone through after the Burning.

She stared at him. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“I remember everything,” he snarled. He remembered that day. “It’s burnt into my mind. The thunder crashing through the sky, a burning city, buildings toppling and the dead... I remember the dead.” He remembered the screams as men and women fell, never to get back up. He remembered his sister pulling him out of a pile of debris that had fallen on him and telling him to run. He remembered the roar of the avalanche of stone and wood that took her away from him. He remembered the bodies of his friends laying motionless on the ground, and he remembered hiding as the killers stalked through the burning ruins in search of survivors. He remembered not moving for days as the city fell silent save for the crackling of the flames, not until the wreckage of his cubbyhole was shifted, light fell on him and a voice shouted. ‘We’ve got a survivor!’ “Everything the Dominion did to us.”

He sat back down on his rock, opening his journal and pulling out the stylus as if to write. He didn’t get the chance before Kallos spoke up.

The enemy soldier looked past Jacob, through him. “I remember that night, too,” she said. “I remember the early warning sirens going off, my dad pulling me out of bed, piling everyone into the car as we drove for a shelter. I remember the first blast that picked us up off the ground and threw us back down... and then I remember waking up outside the car. My mother was beside me, her eyes open but she wasn’t awake. The car was wrecked. My dad was still in the driver’s seat. My brother Saul was next to the car, his neck bent the wrong way. My mother had to pull his body out to get to me. I don’t know if Danny had still been alive and she’d planned to go back for him before she died, or if he’d died in the crash like my father and Saul. I was alone as the city burned, men and women running in all directions. I didn’t know where to go, so I just hid. No one noticed me until the ships landed and the... clean-upbegan.

“They were killing all the survivors,” she continued. “Rounding them up or just gunning them down where they found them. I remember so seeing so many people dying in front of me, running from one hiding spot to the next as they swept the city... me and the other children I found. I remember one scared little boy I’d seen from the neighbourhood. I remember calling to him, trying to get him to come with me... but he was just so scared, he couldn’t.”

She raised her gaze back to Jacob’s face. “Do you remember that, Jakie?”