The Price Of War

Excellence Award in the 'The Write Track 2015' competition

He was dead.
I couldn't believe it.
He didn't deserve this.
His body lay there, in the dirt and the mud, as blood poured from the wound in his chest. He was long gone, and every single one of us knew there was no denying that. Nobody could survive a bullet to the heart. Not unless they were superhuman, but that was something that he had not been. He was human, just like the rest of us, and that was how we had known he was gone before we even saw him. But even knowing this, we came running all the same.

It seemed we were there for no other reason than to watch him die. There was nothing we could do, and that was the worst part. The helplessness we felt as we gathered around him, terrified out of our minds. The knowing that there was nothing we could do, as we tried to convince him he would be okay, and that the war would be over soon. We lied, of course. The war was only just beginning.
I could only imagine the images that came into his mind as he slowly drifted away from us, and into the endless darkness that was death. Did he see the corner store the seven of us would ride our bikes to every weekend to buy ice-cream with the spare change we found down the back of the couches, or in the sewers as we walked to and from school every day? Or did he see the winning goal he kicked in the soccer game back in the fifth grade during lunch break? Did he see all the boys carrying him to class on their shoulders, cheering his name, as if they had won the World Cup, when really they had just beaten the sixth graders?
I hoped he did.
I hoped he saw all those good things rather than the bad
But we would never know. That’s not really a question you ask someone who’s dying.

Felicity didn't want to abandon him. She didn't think it reasonable that we leave him there, in the empty field where he had been assassinated, his life taken in cold blood. But, as the six of us heard shouts and sirens in the distance, we knew we couldn't get him out of there. We couldn't lug him all that way.
And so we ran. We knew that he would never have forgiven us if we had stayed. We knew he wouldn't want us to die for him, not even if he were alive. We were all he had, the six of us. He hadn't a family, nor any friends until he came here. Part of the foster system, he had been sent to live with a family down the street. But he hadn't belonged with them, not really. He had belonged with us. Maybe that was why he hadn't fit in anywhere else.

Maybe we had been his family.

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