And there it was, plain as day, two brothers fighting over the scraps of a bloated carcass for the whole galaxy to see. Lists of people, lists of ghosts, scrolled past the screen behind the bar as Amea leaned into her fourth drink for the evening. The mood in the once lively bar seemed far more quiet than usual. In some corners people tried to keep the levity going, but there just didn’t seem to be any to be found. It was as if they had all come to the realization that they were witnessing history and yet none of them would have the ability to affect it in any meaningful way. It was as if they had all surrendered to the inevitability and futility that was the struggle against time and reality.
As the list on the screen spoke of soldier after soldier who had drawn their final ticket and boarded their transports into obscurity like the obedient little dogs that they were, the bar seemed to get even more quiet. This was what reverence for a cause and loyalty to a nation had gotten them; an unmarked grave on the field, their deaths stripped of meaning and yet still used to fuel the fires of hate. There was not a single care for who they had once been, who they had once known beyond the fact that they were now dead. The second that the plasma bolt which had killed them struck through their skulls and bones had been the moment when they no longer mattered. They were humbled before the force, and on this day the force took more than it gave.
It was the alcohol talking at this point as well as the uncertainty of constantly expecting to see the names of someone Amea actually knew on that list. Names that would be so casually glossed over without paying any heed as to who or what said names even meant to begin with. Deep down she knew that with time she would see Loske Matson on there as well as Maynard Treicolt and Lucien Dooku. Maybe not today, but some day. Because they didn’t matter to those that called the shots. In the big picture they were as unimportant to the cause as any of the other names were. They were the same as all the rest, soldiers who died in the line of duty, discarded like trash, thrown into the rapids by high command with equally high hopes that they would group up tight enough to build a dam.
This was madness and delusion brought to its head, a lack of reason caused by a lapse of judgment. The mere idea to lay your own life down for someone else that you would never meet or see and for a cause that wasn’t truly your own just didn’t register. And that was all besides the point that if war never changed, what was the point of enduring it? No, nothing about this evening would end well for anyone involved, directly or indirectly. Amea gently shook her head as she downed the beer with a sweep and pushed herself away from the bar. There was a bed somewhere around here that she needed to see and nightmares to keep her up.
The bitterness of any other reality could come later.
