She sits down at her computer and stares at a white screen with a thin blinking line on the side. Music plays from a radio across the room and she taps her bare toes to the beat, humming along to the words she knows well. Her fingertips are poised over the keyboard, but she doesn't lower them. She chews on her lower lip, types a word, deletes it as soon as she reads it. The words are not spilling over the screen with barely contained phantasmagorical properties. Isn't that how writing is supposed to work? She sighs, leans back, brow furrowing as she stares at her computer in confusion. Why aren't the words coming when they're always there? The words are always there, the words and the characters and ideas that are always screaming at her from within her skull, never letting her get any rest, that keep her tossing and turning at night because they refuse to rest until they're acknowledged, written down, turned into something semi-material that can exist in a space outside of her exhausted mind. She pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to stifle down her frustration. She wants to break something, kill something, but she can't and she taps her foot with increased speed, no longer matching the song, she hates everything, hates herself and her mind for not working like she wants it to. In the background, the song changes to a slow, lilting tune; one of those songs with strange abilities to instantly calm you down the moment the first note rings out. Silently, she thanks the band for producing such incredible music, and leans forward again, prepared to start this story. She can see the characters clearly, and all that is left is to take them out of the frozen tableaus in her mind and project them into a situation, any situation, it could be dragons and wizards or a crumbling dystopia or time-travelers or cliché high school outcast protagonists who naturally get everything they ever wanted in the end, or soldiers. Yes, soldiers. Civil War era. Even better, minor soldiers who secretly entered the war illegally.
The year will be 1863, in the middle of the war when the end is nowhere near being seen. His name will be Edwin, she decides, but they'll call him Ed. He will be fifteen years old, posing as an eighteen-year-old. He lost his little brother and father to illness within a year of each other, and his mother barely stays out of the factories by serving as a teacher at their local schoolhouse. He has two best friends, and their names are Oscar and Jasper, and Jasper is the oldest at sixteen. They are all leaving things behind; Oscar is leaving behind just a dog as he lives by himself, an orphan at age eleven. Jasper has his whole family— two sisters and parents who work in factories to leave behind, but he can't imagine letting his best friends going to war without him there as well. Ed, Oscar, and Jasper will sneak out after dinner one night to the recruitment office, where they enlist easily; the recruiters looked the other way when approached with the three clearly underage boys.
The three boys will find themselves in an army camp. They will miss home more than anything, and fear for their futures as soldiers. They will suffer through the grim experiences they will encounter with valor, never once even letting themselves question the choice they have made. They will train in harsh conditions, eating insufficient food, sleeping in tents not big enough to keep them completely dry from the rainstorms at night. Jasper will miss his family in the kind of way that leaves a huge, gaping tear in your heart that never stops aching. Ed will exchange letters with his mother, helping ease the pain a bit, and he will encourage Jasper to do the same. "Write to them," he will urge as he writes a letter to his own mother, pausing from the words on the paper to look at his friend, "It will help you feel better."
But Jasper will shake his head sadly and go back to wiping off his muddy boots. "What if they don't respond?" he will ask, even the thought of that possibility giving his voice a hollow quality.
Oscar will laugh and the sound will be sarcastic and sad. "Why wouldn't they?"
Jasper will shrug. He has no response or reasoning to back himself up, but the fear will still be there, the fear that his family would never forgive him for leaving without so much as a wave goodbye.
Oscar won't be able to relate to them entirely, but he will spend every waking hour worrying in the back of his mind if his dog will have enough to eat, or if she has been eaten herself. The latter would not surprise him.
Eventually, there will come a time when they find themselves facing off the Confederates. Oscar will grip his gun tighter, sending a silent prayer to the gray skies, and hope nobody can see the nervous tears that are springing from his eyes. He will be the quiet one, the one who never voices his fears, even to his friends, and takes the suffering of others upon himself so as to lessen their pain. The first shot will ring out, a grim herald, and the battle will launch into action. All that will follow is confusion, bullets flying and thumps as people drop to the ground. Nobody will be able to tell how much time has passed, but an aftermath always follows a battle, and this aftermath will be a hazy one, the air thick and tasting of gun smoke. Bodies will litter the ground, eyes blankly staring around, bullet holes staining their uniforms and missing a limb on occasion. Nobody will notice a younger boy not old enough to be a soldier, brown eyes not quite glazed over and breath still coming out in brief, ragged puffs. His leg will be shattered, and there will be blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. He will try to move, and find that he can't. Nobody will be there to listen as he tries to push out words, a final goodbye to people that aren't even there, and he will die slowly, alone and in pain, and nobody will know that he killed more Confederates than anyone else on the battlefield that day. There will be no stone marker, no grave, and no memories left. Nobody even saw him fall. And the only people that will miss him will be Ed and Jasper, back at the army camp with wounds being tended to and wondering where he is.
Ed and Jasper will never fully grasp the idea that Oscar died in their first battle and will spend every day of the rest of their lives expecting him to turn up someday. Ed will continue writing letters to his mother, and she will continue responding, and he will tell her about Oscar and she will cry but he won't know it. Time will pass, and the war will not end. It seems like it never will. They will fight in more battles and they will feel invincible every time they survive. Then there will come a day, a beautiful day where the sun is shining in the sky and clouds puff along slowly, when there is another battle, more deaths, more screaming, and Ed will be catching his breath behind a boulder. He will look around the side of the rock to survey the turmoil. There will be a Confederate soldier, even younger than he, twelve perhaps. This young Confederate will bear a striking resemblance to Ed's small brother that died of illness three years prior, and for a second he won't be able to tell the difference. He will see the Union solider, his own ally, that he had probably spoken to before, aiming at the small Confederate, and Ed is only able to think of his young brother, and he will charge forward without thinking, and it will be uncanny timing as the bullet meant for the enemy tears into his own heart instead. Ed will die instantly, and the young boy he took a bullet for will see him. He will survive the war, and will raise a family and die at a healthy age, but he will always be confused as to why a Union soldier died for him. Ed will never know that a letter from his mother awaited him at camp. He will never see his mother again, and will never continue a life outside of the Civil War battlefield.
Jasper will see Ed struck down, and needles will plunge into his heart, but he will survive the battle. He will scuttle back to camp with the remaining Union soldiers and sit down heavily outside of his tent. There is nobody to talk to as he cleans his boots or has his wounds tended to. Jasper will see the letter intended for Ed and sigh. He will find paper and a pencil, and write a letter to Ed's mother explaining what happened. He makes sure to highlight the fact that he died saving someone else and that he was a hero. Ed's mother will receive the letter thinking it was from her own son, and open it in excitement, ready for new information about her Ed's experiences in the army. Instead, she reads about his death. Ed's mother will sit alone in their house that night, holding the letter open in her hand, tears dripping down and smudging the words into messy puddles. She will stand up finally and go into their kitchen. There will be a cake sitting on the kitchen table. Ed's mother made one every time she received a letter from Ed, just in case the letter she got said he was coming home soon. The house will seem much bigger and emptier now as she thinks of how she will now be the only one left in it. She will think of the sound of his laughter echoing through the few rooms, baby giggles as he took his first steps and over-exaggerated sobs when he came home after skinning his knee at school. Ed's mother will stare at the cake on the table and will cut it into four pieces. One for Father, she will think, one for Peter, one for Mother and one for Ed. She will leave the cake there, in four slices all ready for her family that will never come home.
Jasper will be the only one of the three to survive the war. He will go home with a heavy heart and live the rest of his days with his family who forgave him, never escaping the sound of gunshots and screams, and will always tell himself that it was his fault Oscar and Ed were dead, and he would live under the delusion that he wasn't good enough to save them. It will be a story where the winners lose everything, where the greatest soldiers are found in unmarked graves. The aftermaths of all battles are different, but this one will just be words on a computer, the sum of an infinitude of stories lost to time. Satisfied with the idea, she sets her fingers back down on the keyboard and types furiously. Finally, the words are there.
A/N: well okay that was exciting. **jazz hands** first of all, I feel like this needs a title but I can't think of one so...ideas would be great, guys :P second of all, I had a second of all but I forgot it.
as always, thanks so much for reading. you guys are all amazing.☆