Memento Mori (MxM)

Chapter 13

Artemus scoffed quietly, and leaned his face into his neck. "Shut up.."

"This is terribly ironic, you know."

"These aren't exactly ghosts, they are.. I'm going to assume demons, the likes of which I never planned on wasting two god forsaken hours of my life on! Oh, god, what on earth are they doing to the..? Oh god! Turn it off, turn it off now, I've tried to watch it but it's so needlessly gory and I've had quite enough," Artemus groaned, wrapping his arms around Calael's midriff to press himself closer to him.

Chuckling softly, Calael flicked the channel over to an eighties era war movie he had never seen before, and this caught Artemus attention once again. It displayed scenes of dashing looking soldiers with impossibly clean, historically incorrect uniforms, shining white teeth that hurt to look at, and equally as dubiously glossy hair, rushing into battle dodging bullets with all the mathematical likelihood of being struck by lightning in the midst of a plane crash. Even Calael - who had never been a connoisseur of fine cinema - found it hard to watch. 

Artemus seemed vastly unimpressed by it. The man kept shaking his head and murmuring criticisms, curling his lip in repulsion whenever something painfully over dramatised would appear on screen; which seemed to compose a great deal of it.  "What a load of codswallop," he muttered, after only five minutes of explosive action. "There's a phrase I learned for this; dulce bellum inexpertis."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means, war is sweet for those who never experienced it! God, it must be far too bloody easy to take the wars that I lived through and turn them into these glorified tales of heroes and romanticised stories of separated lovers," he scoffed, sitting back with his arms folded across his chest. "I'm willing to bet good money that this flick shows nothing of the dead they could never send home.. Or, the lovers who never came back. The sixteen year old boys taken too soon because they were pressured to lie about their age just to go and die for their king and country! And how about trench foot? Hardly glamarous, but the doctor I fucked knew a lot about it. And, and, particularly not those who stayed behind carrying gas masks and taping newspapers over their god damn windows!"

"Artie.. Don't get upset, love, I can just turn it over?"

"Please. It's just.. the war was all very nice and interesting at first, like it is portrayed, but within a couple of months the phony war was over and everything was suddenly very, very real, and terrifying. I was just lucky to live out here, at least slightly tucked away from everything.."

"You do seem very, well.. well informed, for a person of your time."

"Of course I am, what's that supposed to mean?"

"Well the ministry of propaganda censored everything, no? That's a fact I remember from history class. They didn't want people developing negative opinions of the war."

"Sometimes your character isn't based on just the materials you take in, but on the things you know and accept inherently, Calael," Artemus sighed, folding his hands together. "Do you think every German hated Jews? Certainly not. I'm talking of moral instincts. I knew in my heart that the war was a hideous thing.. Many of us did. But nobody would speak out and seem like they were unpatriotic. Regardless, we knew our own minds even as the papers and the radio tried to put rose tinted glasses over everything. As an example.. I turned out to be a homosexual, in spite of growing up with no knowledge of what that meant aside from a passage in the Bible they would read us at the village Catholic school, that told us of men being stoned to death for lying together. If that had successfully influenced me as they intended it to, perhaps I would have lived a long and full life, instead of succumbing to illegal desires and being beaten to death for it."