War Crimes
by Diamonde
None of the people mentioned are mine, they belong to Marvel comics. Not that they deserve Stryfe after Blood Brothers (futile attempt to supress gag reflex), I may have to adopt him. But I'm not making any money, which is the important thing. (The story's mine, though.)
ARCHIVING: Ask first (please include relevant URL), and I'll probably say say yes.
PERMISSION: No MST, no pop-up.
FEEDBACK: Do I like guys in red capes and metal? ;) No flames please, reasoned responses only.
CONTINUITY: After Stryfe's mysterious return.
Now this idea jumped me as I was walking to the bus stop, so if you don't like it just blame the biology text I read on the train for making my brain weird. If it's good, it was all my doing.
I was dead. Now I'm back. Our family seems to do that often, had you noticed? I had. But then, I've been dead. I had lots of time to think about our patterns of behavior. I came up with some strange things, Nathan. Would you like to hear them?
Do you realise that after we're dead, nobody in this complacent backwater time will care about our lives? Whenever we see each other, we fight. Why? Because I hate you and you hate me. We've carried it back with us, for the things we did in the future-that-does-not-yet-exist.
For how long have we been trapped in an endless round of revenge? A Clan Chosen force massacres a severely outnumbered Caananite scout group after they had surrendered. But what else could they do with them? Cannanites burn one of your camps and execute every living being we can find. They had nothing to do with it, but how were we to know? Everyone knows that the enemy all look the same. You run out to avenge your 'innocent blood', and then we do the same. But Nathan, when one thinks about it... whether they died at the hands of your soldiers or mine, weren't they equally dead? We've both killed guilty and blameless alike, although obviously my tally's higher. You justify yours by the purity of your cause, while I simply don't care. In that time the only way our vicious circle of constant retaliation was going to end was for one side to completely obliterate the other. I think you'll agree that I was winning. But we both recoiled from that final solution (irony intended), and ended up here. Still fighting the war we've carried back with us.
How amusing we must have appeared, both with our little bands of young mutants like a parody of the armies we once commanded... still fighting. Using them, both of us, to fight for sides that did not yet exist. Now it is once again only us, and still we struggle with each other. Still going around our circle, I stab your back and you'll stab mine... But better to die as competing generals than as incontinent dotards, drooling side by side as we nostalgically recall battles nobody cares about.
We are the last, Nathan. Do you think that it matters to them? Those little children, our 'parents', your precious Domino... they don't care what you were fighting for, only that it was you fighting. They decided that you were 'fighting the good fight' as you people so quaintly put it, but they live in this time. The atrocities we both perpetrated mean nothing. They cannot comprehend what we did or why. They never saw the bodies stretch to the horizon, smelled the burning, felt the mind-screams as thousands fell. Only we are left of those horrors that we shrug off so easily, through Askani philosophy or simple indifference. I do remember it, though. They are right. Nobody wins a war. But you can be the last one standing, and that suits me nicely.
So, until we meet again, Askani'son. And after that? I'll see you in Hell, for surely we both know that that is where we belong. I doubt we'll enjoy it, the company will be terrible.
End