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He closes his eyes, wearily, as he lays the pen down. How many months has it been since he's slept properly, without agonising screams of dying boys echoing in his ears? A place beyond nightmares ,burning red into his closed eyelids.
The moon shines like a silver beacon, as it would be to his mother and sister at home.
He picks up the pen, deliberately, slowly. How familiar it feels in his hands. How much does it hurt him to put it down for one last time?
A million words dance in his mind, though he knows they will never be put down on paper. It is time to bequeath them to the children and dreamers he's decided he's dying for.
He does not cry, though tears have always been quite easy for him. He does not fear, he does not hate anymore. But when he stares out on the land of nightmares, all he can see is the grass and flowers that will one day creep up over these plains.
Victory will come for them, he knows this. And before them ,for him. As always in these cases, he does not question how he knows.
He does not hesitate to slide the pen into his pocket on a whim. It has earned its place there , his oldest and best friend, that will warm his hands in death.
There is still beauty. And he takes a childish, simple, uncorrected belief in his stance that the most precious things in the world are innocence and beauty. They abound in him, and he allows them to submerge him into a world where skies are blue instead of red.
It is easier now. Easiest it has been since January, because he draws closer to it with each of his numbered breaths.
When the sun sets, the music plays loudest in his ears. He can almost see now, the tall figure that has perused him for twenty-two years, hidden in the shadows, now finally before him in the dimming light. Familiar and unfamiliar faces, smile out at him in the red glow of the fading sun. Maybe now he's closest to understanding. In moments, he feels, he will know it all.
And such is life, he ponders. His left hand closes on the pen, childishly, perhaps, sentimentally, but it is who he is. What he knows they all will remember him by. He stares at the sky for one last time, and he hears the trigger pull.
Those anguished lines now safe on paper were a lie.
Even now, the floor of heaven is divinely beautiful, as it should be. The wind is no longer brimming with horror struck voices that cannot be stilled, but with the laughter of the girl, his sister, to whom he had promised it would.
That is comfort.
How soon his memories will be purged and the oblivion of forgetfulness will embrace him.
He knows it is sailing towards him, it has been, and will be, mere milliseconds. He cannot move away; he does not want to.
He hears that laughter, bright, merry, filled with the ringing bells of spring, louder and louder like the peals of a divine bell, he thinks, for the hundredth time. Or the bubble of a brook. Blue eyes, as steadfast and strong as the seas that have ebbed and receded for a million years. It is inches behind him now, as the striking memory of the wistful eyes fades. The pain is brief, thankfully, as he feels himself fall for the slightest instant. For one second, the ground is delightfully brown rather than red as he knows it will be when they take him away.
And as the world, so lovingly and thoroughly documented by him, its extreme polarities alternately worshipped and despised, mists into a hazy blur, for one last time, there is neither regret nor fear in the newly ruptured youung heart that pulses out one last, agonising beat. There is only love, the oldest and truest love, for the enormous world and all it encompasses ,and for the life it is rapidly leaving.
Finally, the song of two decades resonates in the penultimate milliseconds, sung in the voice that resounds of beauty and home.
"Oh, I saw a ship, a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea;
And oh ,it was all laden with pretty things for me."
The last smile comes out, on the nearly deserted hill, and the ground stays clean no longer.