HONOR, PRESTIGE, WAR!!!! (corpsemaiden) wrote in missions, @ 2012-11-13 17:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! narrative, milleuda folles |
WHO: Milleuda Folles, mentions of her family.
WHAT: Revenge.
WHEN: First day of the last mission.
WHERE: Battlefield, various places.
WARNINGS: lol, not graphic violence?
Milleuda is six and Wiegraf is twelve and the two of them are sitting at the kitchen table, staring forlornly at dinner – half a loaf of crusty bread, soup with limp vegetables and a pathetic, pitiful turnip, beer because there is no clean water – their mother threads her fingers through Milleuda’s hair and their father sits at the head of the table, eyes straight ahead, and his voice booms out, “Eat,” and Milleuda does, because she doesn’t know the next time that she will. Their home is a glorified hut built on a crumbling foundation and tilted wooden walls, smelling like overripe vegetation and the burningly soapy scent of laundry, Wiegraf tells her it also smells like sweat and the metallic tang of blood, but Milleuda only smells blood when they get meat (on Yevontide, on birthdays) and it makes her stomach twist in hunger. Each spoonful tastes like nothing except dirt but Milleuda finishes her soup, nibbles on the turnip greens in the bottom of her bowl, and stares outside their grimy window into the Galbadian frost, pretending that she is not still cold, still hungry. - Milleuda is seven and Wiegraf is thirteen and the two of them are in the front yard, Wiegraf chopping wood while Milleuda hovers around him, eyeing the axe and cheering when he successfully splits a log cleanly in half, so much so that he shoots her a bashful smile, knocks her on the shoulder lightly with his fist. Their parents are not home – where are they? Milleuda wonders – but when she falls asleep at night, she dreams of the crash and din of swords clanging, funeral pyres, and her father standing in front of soldiers, screaming, ”Eat.” They dig bowls of turnip soup out of their sheaths instead of swords and eat with their hands. - Milleuda is eight and Wiegraf is fourteen and the two of them are nowhere near one another – Wiegraf at Galbadia Garden, Milleuda waiting impatiently by the window for her brother to come home. Her parents return that year and the elderly woman next door no longer has to feed Milleuda grudging bits of food gleaned from her own sparse pantry but there are lines in her mother’s face and her father is missing three fingers – they come back to her incomplete, but at least they are there. Anger simmers in their soup bowls, in their faces: Milleuda eats without complaint. - Milleuda is nine and Wiegraf is fifteen and the two of them are standing in front of Trabia Garden after his transfer goes through (the bureaucracy slows him down, demands papers and papers), Milleuda’s hand wrapped around her only materia (cracked Fire) as she bades her brother good-bye; it is the last time she will see him for years. - Milleuda is ten and Wiegraf is sixteen and the Corpse Brigade is dining in their kitchen, old, grizzled men leaning against broken kitchen cabinets, smiling with brown teeth and telling ribald jokes while her mother laughs raucously, her father’s arm protectively slung around her shoulders. Milleuda knows that they all hate Galbadia and in the morning they will march to Deling with torches and swords drawn and then later half of them will return to their homes in gurneys, missing limbs, missing breath, but for now she grins because hope is contagious and good always prevails. - Milleuda is ten and Wiegraf is seventeen and he has not written her in nearly two months. The last time they saw each other, their mother was a broken assortment of bones and blood that stuck to her teeth like a lipstick smear; her last meal was turnip soup. Her mother dies on a Tuesday with a rattling breath and honor painted on her face with sword wounds, an amputated arm, gangrenous disease creeping up her bad leg. Milleuda finds her first in the morning, stiff; she takes the bowl of half-eaten soup, dumps it in the garden (where nothing substantial has grown for nearly six years, the earth as stubborn and hateful as the empire that claims it), and cries. - Milleuda is eleven and Wiegraf is eighteen and she is writing to him a letter from her desk at Balamb garden, which she has attended for about six months. His own letter – full of useless drivel, she thinks, about the other cadets at his garden, his annoyance with the looming aristocracy present even there, his sword technique and how it is steadily improving – lays next to her, well-loved and creased and reread dozens of times over. She thinks of what she wants to say – how she misses their father, how angry she is, how she hates how threadbare her secondhand uniform looks, how much she loathes the royalty that gallivant around the garden – but she does not say any of that. She writes him a letter about how the hot dogs taste good and leaves to go train. She has some feelings she wants to get out. - Milleuda is twelve and Wiegraf is nineteen and she reads the newspaper because the Corpse Brigade is in the news and there is a picture of Wiegraf – blonde hair cropped close, shaded in greys, with the same snub nose, the round face that makes him her brother – and the headline reads something about betrayal and patriotism and how wrong they are. Milleuda takes the paper, rips it into thin strips, throws all of them into the wastebasket. Wiegraf’s face is turned into slots, rip, rip, riiiiip, and stares at her balefully from the trash, as if she is Galbadia. - Milleuda is thirteen and Wiegraf is twenty and she’s holding a sword and parrying with Instructor Cadmus while he tells her to keep lower, Miss Folles, meet me here, here, and there while she grits her teeth at the clang and vibrating at blade-meeting-blade until she twists, slips, her ankle giving out. Her sword clatters next to her and she falls on her hands, angry, annoyed, and does not accept the hand offered to her to help her out. I can do this, she says, hands stinging, knees bleeding, but she picks up her sword and resumes her stance, teach me, I can do this. Somewhere, her brother stands in front of a battlefield in front of a line of hundreds of Galbadian soldiers and repeats the same thing to himself: I can do this. - Milleuda is fourteen and Wiegraf is twenty-one and the two of them are sitting at the kitchen table, staring forlornly at dinner – half a loaf of crusty bread, soup with limp vegetables and a pathetic, pitiful turnip, beer because there is no clean water – while the clamor of the Midgar slums continues outside. It is their first meal together in years. Milleuda breaks the bread with her finger, passes a piece to Wiegraf, and they chew thoughtfully. She does not mention the new scars on his arms, back, and face; he does not mention her blistered hands, her ripped dress. The only thing of interest that occurs is when he asks her if she will join the Corpse Brigade; her hand hovers over her mug of beer before she nods slowly, and that is that. - Milleuda is fifteen and Wiegraf is twenty-two, but she’s the only one of the Folles family on the battlefield now, digging her heel into the soft ground and feeling a scream rake itself out of her throat. Her father once held her by the shoulders and told her that there was no glory in war, no honor in it, that the killing of a man is the sin that lines a face, that breaks a back. Someone’s father-mother-son-daughter-cousin-uncle-a |