Today was the usual Sunday mix of the crossword puzzle and some free-writing:
War is hell. But that’s okay. I’ve been to hell and they know me there. It wasn’t so long ago that they were calling my brother The Devil, capital T, capital D. It wasn’t so long ago that they were calling him the boss, and I was down there in hell what seemed like all the time. My brother didn’t go in for the whole pointy horns and pitchfork act like the guy before him — some traditions, Frank said, are worth keeping and some ain’t — but there wasn’t anybody down there with the guts to cross him and, by extension, me. Times may change, and war may be hell, but hell’s still where most of my real friends hang their hats.
And, anyway, it’s where she is, the last time I saw her. Not like I could leave this place even if I wanted to.
Nowadays, Frank’s down in the Pit, getting tortured, which is a demotion any way you slice it — even if the things that live in the Pit didn’t spend all their time slicing into him. The crew the board hired on to replace Frank after the whole mess has been looking for a way to get us out of this war he started, but I don’t know if they’ve been looking too hard, if you catch my meaning. It’s easy to bad-mouth Frank and the hole his policies maybe dug us into, but it’s a lot harder to turn your back on the opportunities a war like this presents. Nobody likes the war, but seems like everybody likes profiteering from it.
I couldn’t really tell you what the war is all about. Even me, a bona fide damn hero by some accounts, and blood relation to the guy who declared the war in the first place… Even I don’t have much sense of it anymore, what we’re fighting for — beyond some board member’s hypocrisy and greed — and even who the enemy is supposed to be. Was a time, not too long ago, when I would’ve said it was the first demons, the ones who got here long before me and Frank were even a twinkle in our dad’s eye topside. Except, truth be told, she’s a demon, or at least she was living with them, in their nomadic camps. And I’m not really prepared to start thinking of her as my enemy, much less enemy of all of hell, not with everything’s that gone between us. I haven’t seen her in months, maybe almost a year now, but I can’t see me putting a knife to her throat or a gun to her head like I’ve done to a hundred dozen demons since this damn war started.
I’ve been back in the capitol city for about half a week now; in theory, I’m on leave, but I’m really here to pick up supplies and manpower and new orders, before heading back out into the flames. That first day back, I found myself standing at the edge of the Pit — it’s carefully guarded deep in the citadel, and I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I know a guy — and I found myself talking to Frank even though everybody knows you can’t hear anything when you’re down there. It’s like being in a coma, except you’re being flayed alive over and over instead of lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Still, I found myself talking the same way you would with a coma patient, asking for advice, telling him what was new on the front lines, that sort of thing. And I found, despite what I’d promised myself, that before long I was talking to Frank about Sarah, even though we’d never talked about her when he was still in charge, and as far as I knew Frank didn’t even know she existed. It’s not like Frank was anti-demon — it was a war of necessity, he’d liked to say, even after the board was stripping him of his office and casting him into the Pit. But he didn’t know I’d fallen for one of them. I wasn’t even sure myself if that’s what you’d call it. But I needed to talk.
Neither one was entirely satisfactory, but I think I got more enjoyment out of the writing.