It's damp, cold. Your hands are numb from the ropes around your wrist, and your ribs ache from the repeated beatings. All you want to do is lie here and never get up again, but then that voice you know so well echoes around the prison, and you know that you have to get up and look at your failure right in the face.
He looks pristine. Unaffected. He tells you that he's received the award he's always wanted. He thanks you for leading him to your home, where your family and your comrades were. All of the elderly, young, and infirm. People who are all dead thanks to your idiocy, your foolishness for thinking that... the person standing in front of you could ever be...
I'll kill you. I'll kill you. No matter what --
You can't hear anything over the rage and terror in your heart. You need to kill him, before you lose anyone else. They were your people and you chose them over him, and now this is how it all ends.
You barely register the hands on your arms as they drag you out after him, to the courtyard where the gallows is set up. Where the others are similarly bound, waiting their turn for the scaffold. These are all your men, but the man facing you is your brother, the person you love most in the world showing you his warmest smile, as if everything's going to be okay. And then he's dead, and then the rest of them are dead too, and you know that it's all because of you. Because of the decisions you made and that person you trusted in.
You did this. Everyone you bled for and protected are all gone. You led your people, and then you let them down so thoroughly. No one's left, except you. Nothing's left, except your life, oh so mercifully granted.
This isn't the first time Manwol's seen this memory, but it hurts just the same. ...Maybe even more considering what she just said. ...Nothing alike, huh?]
[.............The pain feels like an ice cold needle, in your chest.]
[That kind of failure...of having people rely on you, only to be led into a trap with them and have them hurt and destroyed because of you...its so raw, so horrible, that his hands tremble at his sides.]
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This isn't the first time Manwol's seen this memory, but it hurts just the same. ...Maybe even more considering what she just said. ...Nothing alike, huh?]
hey yaywon stabs you THIS IS SAD
[That kind of failure...of having people rely on you, only to be led into a trap with them and have them hurt and destroyed because of you...its so raw, so horrible, that his hands tremble at his sides.]
[He bites down on his lip, shaking his head.]
I'm...so sorry, Manwol.