Casus Belli || Band of Brothers

blood is thicker than water

Trigger Warning: Assault and mentions of killing. 

I have been trying to tag when new things crop up but please do note that this story is going some darker places and I want everyone to make sure they are guarding their mental health & safety. From this point on, it will be violent and possibly triggering. Casus Belli may not be the story for you. 

The faucet was leaky. A steady, drip, drip, drip was the painfully discernable sound in my housing. Even on the busiest street in London, it audibly kept time. It was a beat of a drum, the ticking of a clock, and the twitch of my eyelids as I stared up at the ceiling. Military-funded housing was lousy at best but better than the ground in Normandy. The leaky faucet could have been the beat of a battlefield, a gunshot steadily tapping out the rhythm of the war that was still waging across the channel. It was a beat that I had been removed from, confined to these four walls.

I wasn't paraded out of the company with fanfare and shame. I was removed, silently, quickly, with as much discretion as could be managed. I hadn't expected it. I had been ready to hold my head high as I was marched away in shackles of shame, avoiding the eyes of the men I had wanted to trust me but that had never come to pass. The swiftness to which I had been rejected was startling and stung like a wasp's blow to my heart.

the faucet dripped with the rhythm of a clock that I wished I could turn back. To do what? I didn't know. After two weeks in this room, waiting for new orders, waiting for new assignments, I still didn't know quite what I regretted. Not a word that I had spoken would I take back. Not a movement or shot I had fired. But I would have done anything to be back in the ranks of those I had left. But why?

I had been trained for solitary missions, an ally somewhere deep in enemy territory at most. Never a fleet of men to call allies or even friends. I had been left to my own devices for two years and for some reason, the second I had been placed in the company of others I had gone soft.

The faucet kept dripping and the world kept turning, leaving me standing in one firmly planted spot. Where was I to turn?

My mind found those two weeks a time for inward reflection, turning towards my thoughts. I hadn't been given much time to think. After months of waiting, waiting, waiting, and a few weeks of a flurried activity and fighting I was left a hastily packed kitbag overflowing onto the dingy carpet of the hotel and a cluttered mind.

Miriam had always said cluttered minds were wont to trip their owners. Her own silent ways left a lot of time to shelve and store her mind's wanderings but I had never inherited that skill, even after years of coaching. Two weeks of silence with only my reflection for company left me with ample time to perfect the art.

I had known silence, come to relish in it in those days and nights that blurred together. The sky beyond the windows was gray, indiscernible from sunrise to sunset. London had been a mistress of mystery since I had been ushered into the hotel in the dead of night with no understanding of my surroundings. I hadn't been to this city that my mother had once called home. It seemed only fitting to be trapped with only the memory of her creation.

My waking hours were spent pacing, wearing a track of my bare feet into the carpet while I prayed for any knock on the door. I knew only when to rise and fall by the watch, scrapped and cracked from my exploits with explosives. Round and round I went, my feet falling to the tempo of the leaky faucet, a drumbeat, or a ticking clock.