Soldier's Medal: Soldier's Medal

The little girl finds him while out foraging with her grandmother. "What's all this? Are we in danger?" She gasps. She is about 7 or 8 at this point, still growing into her wings. Her grandmother surveys the impromptu battlefield grimly. "They were taken from their rightful time and place, but continued whatever war they were fighting. Now they are all dead." 

He makes a weak noise, frantic, desperate. He has been lying here in his own blood since the night has fallen, and the sun has risen. The girl hears him first, eyes wide with alarm. "Grandmother, there!" She points at him. The old woman hobbles to him with surprising speed, and together they left him from the pile of corpses.

They give him a home, a spare room of theirs. To his dismay he can understand them perfectly, but they only understand a few words from him. They dress his wounds and give him food, but his body refuses to heal. He can't communicate to them that he needs something more, something from his homeland that he doesn't think exists here. He tries drawing it out for them, but they don't recognise it at all. Slowly his legs start to lose feeling, and sooner or later it will go all the way up his body, and then his head, until he joins his comrades who have marched ahead.

It's okay. His country was dying. His family have all gone on before him. The view outside his window is amazing, anyway. Clear skies, green luscious grass. Flowers. Birds. All these things he has only ever read about in books and seen in films. The girl asks what his world is like. He answers through drawings.

Grey buildings shooting up into the grey clouds, grey skies covered in grey soot. He draws the monsters that razed his home city to the ground, and the long war that began when he was but a young man. It's been so long that he's forgotten what is it like outside of the army. He was drafted, and his dreams and aspirations no longer mattered. That was how it was. He was made to die on the battlefield, he may as well have been born on it.

The girl's eyes well up in tears as she slowly pieces together his story. He points to the world out there, outside the window. It's a world he's never seen before. He gestures for her to reach into the inner pocket of his jacket, where she takes out the one memento he has kept safe throughout all the years. A plastic medal, a toy that he used to have as a child. It was the first gift he remembered earning instead of simply receiving, for some kind of test or exam done well. His mother didn't have much to spare but she had been so proud of him, she really had been. So she took a toy from her own childhood and cleaned it up, painted the plastic golden and threaded a new piece of blue ribbon through it. The blue had faded over the years to reveal a creamy white, and the gold paint had chipped away, but the toy still held. When he had returned from a battle once to a flat that had gone up in flames, this medal had survived the destruction. Now it will outlive him, too. 

He presses the medal to her chest, urges her to take it. "Thank you," He rasps, knowing she won't understand the words, but hoping she will understand the sentiment nonetheless. "I am glad I could die here."

A few days later he doesn't wake up in the morning. The grandmother and the girl buries him on a hill near the battlefield they had found him, but still far away from the remnants of metal and massacre. They plant a small sapling there, and let him rest peacefully under the blue skies.

The plastic medal the girl keeps, honouring the unspoken hope that the soldier had given her in his last days. Now it is her medal, the symbol of all her achievements and all her scars, just as it had for the soldier, and just as it had for the soldier's mother.