Prompt #5

Prompt:

Character B bleeding heavily while Character A tries to staunch the blood but Character B is more concerned about the fact that stoic Character A is sobbing and panicking

Artillery fire continued to rain down upon the scorched, ruined, and bloody field. The booms of the shells as they dug themselves into the earth and ignited rang across the mile long stretch of trenches, barbed wire, and the corpses of man and machine, but to the boy, the song of the dreadnought’s cannons were but a dull lullaby, ambient and blended into the background.

That had not been the case mere moments ago. For a time, those explosions had been the boy’s world, the massive warship the boy’s sky as The Oracle’s Fist entered the airspace above, blotting out the cold light of planet’s star. The boy could still recall his and his comrades’ cheers as the mighty vessel’s arrival was announced by their barely operational EmHz caster. A dangerous distraction, especially with so many enemies within arm’s reach, but such was how great their relief. The tides of war were finally turning in their favor, they had thought. Air support was here, reinforcements would soon follow, the enemy would break and retreat. Their position would stand.

Such thoughts and hopes vanished when the first shell fell into their trench, the opening of a salvo that commenced in full force less than a second later. The screams of friend and for alike filled the air, inaudible over the explosions that became the boy’s world. The Federation soldier that had been standing in front of him, the muzzle of their trench gun pointed at the boy, vanished in a spray of dirt and red as the boy was suddenly flung off his feet and thrown into the wall of the trench. His vision blurred, his limbs lost feeling, there was a ringing in his ears that muffled the surrounding cacophony. The earth beneath and around him shook as the warship above unleashed hell.

Seconds later, the world became still. The cannons had gone silent. The ringing slowly subsided, and the boy could now hear the crackling static of the caster before it at last gave up and died. His eyes remained blurry, but try as he might, the boy could not will his hand up to clear them.

Something suddenly landed on the boy’s shoulder. The boy tried to shake it off, but his body continued to disobey him. He blinked, and as his sight slowly started to return, he caught the distinctive red shade of a commissar’s cap. The officer’s face soon became visible, and the boy found that he recognized that brown mustache speckled with gray, those deep furrows in the man’s brow, and the green glow of his artificial eye.

His direct commissar, the man who spent the past three months making him and the rest of their squad miserable. The humorless man who enacted cruel disciplines over the smallest infraction. The man who confiscated the chocolate bars the boy’s mother had sent him, who had another boy flogged for defacing his official Alliance issued maintenance manual.

The boy struggled to stand at attention, but his legs proved no more cooperative than his arms had been. He winced, ready for the verbal whipping he was about to receive for this sloth, disrespect, and disregard to military procedure. The screaming came, but the insults and reprimands the boy was expecting were absent, and the shouts appeared to be directed at someone else. The pressure on the boy’s shoulder shifted as the man removed a hand and brought it to his earpiece.

Whatever was being said on the commissar’s personal caster, it clearly wasn’t what the man was hoping to hear. The boy watched as the man’s face turned red and twisted with a rage he had never seen displayed. There was something feral in the way the man snarled and screamed up at the warship still hovering over them. The man’s hand tightened around the boy’s shoulder to the point of pain, and the grip loosened almost immediately when the boy let out a soft cry. The man returned his other hand to the boy’s shoulder, and as he leaned over the boy’s body, the boy felt something drip onto his cheek.

Rain? No, it wasn’t the season, though the boy was starting to notice that the ground he was seated upon had somehow gotten damp and sticky. The boy looked up at the man standing over him, and his jaw went slack. Tears were streaking down the stern man’s face as his lips trembled and he seemed to gasp and struggle for air, his shoulders shaking with each inhale. The face before the boy was a far cry from the calm and collected expression the man had on minutes prior when he was barking out orders and directing with one hand and with his other was relieving Federation soldiers of their heads and limbs with his vibrosaber.

Said weapon was nowhere to be found, but the observation and surprise that the commissar would allow his issued weapon to go missing and unaccounted for distracted the boy for only a couple of seconds before the boy returned to the man’s face. He stared long and hard at the older man’s features. Maybe if he could just describe it right, his squad mates might believe this incredible tale, but even if they didn’t, the boy still wanted the image of the crying commissar burned into his memory.

To the boy’s frustration, the edges of his vision were beginning darken, causing the scene to become obscured. The boy tried to blink the darkness away, but his eyelids suddenly became heavy, and reopening and keeping his eyes open was an arduous task in itself. Gradually, the darkness spread, and soon the boy could only catch the man’s reddening natural eye until it too was swallowed by the darkness.