Washington

Guard/Ex-Mercenary
Resilient/Sarcastic/Jaded

"I know I used to be a real piece of ****, but at least I'm trying to do something about it."
RVB Season12, Ep.18

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All this used to come easy. Sharp claws, sharp teeth. Camaraderie. Crunch down on an apple while sitting in a circle with the other soldiers, the ones you know you can trust, laugh at a crude joke with juice dribbling down your chin. Know that your aim with one of those flashy piles of newfangled junk isn’t worth two orange peels, but know that your squad’s got your back, above everything else. Well. A soldier’s humor might be ugly, but war is uglier, and the deeper in you go, the more desperately you want out. Washington knows this, now. He knows it better than anything, and better than anyone. He knows it ‘cause it’s the first item on the long list of things that are tearing his life apart.

Problem is that he can’t even face this with his team, not anymore. After they all spent months out there in the scorching sun, no food, no water, constantly at each other’s throats, he thought he’d never see any of them again. They’d split up for good. He should’ve known better, though. Should’ve known that he’d run across them again if he went right back to selling his skills for money, right back to being nothing but a pretty little mechanical war machine. Sharp teeth, sharp claws. And sure enough, when he came across them again the operation went so pear-shaped that they put him out of a job a second time. Before then, it had never struck him how lonely he was without them. Now? It’s all past him.
Everything.

Now he sits out here on the side of a dusty path and pretends to be watching for enemies when really there’s nothing to watch for. Just his wild-eyed wolf, sweetest thing on this earth, named Maine after someone he thought he wanted to forget. He spits melon seeds into the dirt, thinks that if he could grow anything, he would grow vineyards, and orchards, and fruit fields as far as the eye could see, in every direction. He makes soft coaxing noises at the stray cats that wander by, thinks that if he could ever make friends again, he’d do well to make friends with one of those cats. What he’s trying to do is be better. But if he’s being honest, he doesn’t know what being better means, and at this point in his life, he thinks it might be a little too late to ask.


_{Written by Mercurium}