Fight to Forget (Sunstreaker x OC)

10

Self-Destruction - I Prevail
Animals - Architects
Bullet (Scarbelly remix) - Fight The Fade

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Fair warning, y'all. Shit's about to get real. If you can't handle reading about the Iraq War, here's the door.
If you're still in for it... here we go.

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Melissa woke up with a start, her first thought consisting of the realization that she was on the ground.

Immediately, she knew without a doubt that she was in Fallujah. Cold certainty and a sense of unquestioning responsibility forced her brain to push through the deadening haze over her self-awareness. It was time to get up now. She had a job to do. She had people relying on her to do that job.

Except... no. That wasn't right. Iraq was a hell of a lot drier than this. And it usually smelled like fresh shit. Not good, clean dirt. This wasn't Fallujah. This was too nice to be anywhere she'd ever been before.

Groaning, Melissa pried her eyelids open by sheer force of will before abruptly trying to push herself upright. Pain spiked through her skull like a jackhammer a second later and she cringed back against the ground, groaning. Fuck. Hangover.

She waited for a few minutes, gripping her skull as if to keep it together until the worst of the pounding became bearable again. After an indeterminate amount of time had passed, she tried to push to her feet unsteadily, leaning heavily on the tree behind her as her ankle twisted and she nearly lost her balance twice on the way up. Her loose hair fell around her face, tickling her nose and almost making her sneeze. The pounding in her head was horrible and made her want to collapse back to the ground in agony, but she knew it was entirely self-inflicted. She didn't have much sympathy for herself. She couldn't remember much of what had happened last night, but what she did know, was that she had behaved in a manner entirely unfit for her status. She'd embarrassed herself, and quite possibly the medal. She was only lucky she hadn't killed someone, and really got herself fucked. As it stood, she'd better not show her face around town for awhile. She'd be lucky if no one found out who she was.

She was such a fucking mess.

Melissa looked down at herself in disgust, barely able to focus through the lightning strikes splitting open her skull at random. Memories of when she'd tried to crack her own head open to escape being tortured to death distorted her reality and confused her. She couldn't focus on what she actually looked like, here, in the present. She couldn't remember what she'd been wearing. Not then, and not now. There was no memory of anything but the mistakes she'd made that led her to this point. No focusing on the present. Even the past was blurred.

All she could see was the damn ground beneath her feet. That was her focal point. That was her lifeline. She was drowning again in her head, and she wasn't even sure this time what was dragging her under. Just a vague sense of impending doom. She felt hollowed out and used up, like a spent shell casing. Some nameless, faceless being had aimed and fired her, and now there was nothing left of her but what had been discharged from the side of the gun. Maybe someone had picked her up and saved her. Maybe they'd awarded her bravery and sacrifice, but it didn't matter, because it wasn't hers to receive. It was everyone else's, too. Maybe she'd been the shot to kill the target, but it had been her team that had tracked fire up to the mark. Her men that had been with her through everything. Her friends that had died, and left her behind to grieve for them.

So, yeah. Maybe she was the brass casing someone had picked up off the dirt and polished, saving it as a trophy to showcase the victory of another successful kill... but she was still empty inside. Still used. Being honored for what she'd done didn't mean a damn thing when she'd went through hell to save people that had ended up dying in her arms. She hadn't wanted that medal. She didn't deserve it. The only reason she'd accepted it, was because by living, she'd taken up a responsibility to the dead. Her life was now tied to theirs. It was her job to live for them. That medal was theirs, not hers. It belonged to the people that only she would truly remember as the heroes she'd known them to be. Everyone else thought she alone had run through crossfire to save all those people, over and over again, taking heat from both her own men and the enemy. Everyone else thought she'd fought her captors alone, bare-handed and desperate. They were right, in a way. John had only made it so far before he'd been cut down beside her, left bleeding and motionless in the dirt at her feet. Most of the others hadn't even made it to Fallujah. They hadn't been there when she was captured. They weren't there to help her fight off those animals that had dragged her into the nearest mosque so that her countrymen couldn't rescue her without committing a war crime. The dead hadn't been there to get her out again.