The second his head touches the pillow, lying prone in the hospital bed waiting for the shakes to go away, for the nurse to bring him one set of drugs to counteract the other one, he sees it again. That endless expanse of trenches crisscrossing the fatherland's violated domains as the poisons through his system. The mechanical hound snarl of the advancing tanks, stinking of rust and squirting oil from the grinding armour; once a testament to the Kingdom of Arthuria's mechanical superiority, now a rudimentary organ in a dying beast who had only to kill for its black lifeblood.
The screams of his brothers in their death knells as they answered the Immerese guns.
He hears the Volkic shouts before he catches it. The flash of hot steel, the reek of hardened Dust plastics and mouldered canvas. Like a reflex, he jumps to the left and intercepts the Jager by his jacket collar and the handle of one of his pauldrons. It happens so quickly, only an impulse, his actions not his own...at least thats how he narrates it in his head.
He doesn't know what he expects from bringing his raiding club down on the Jager's skull. For whatever reason, he couldn't foresee the spouting blood, the screams of an unknown mother in a foreign tongue, echoing again and again amidst the broken hydraulics of the Jager's helmet. He cradles him in his arms a minute, life a dim candle, this other boy becoming just a vaguely anthropomorphosized pile of limp flesh and armour and colours. All he can think to do is say how sorry he is.
His senses have dimmed so much now he does not hear one of his sergeants, nearly drowned in an ecstasy of distant pneumatic releasing. "Gas! Gas! Lieutenant, what do we--Lieutenant Cainhursdt, sir!?"
Officer of the Borealisian Corps, the Arthurian Expeditionary Force's propaganda darling, thought of as hard-bitten frontiersmen. He is no such adventurer: the scion of an aristocratic family, cursed by his bloodline for being no one but himself. Fed up with a struggling and meandering law practice and with no reliable coinage to finance his hormones, he turns to military service.
"You there, sir!" The recruiting officer says, "Doesn't a gentleman like you want to do his bit for king and country?"
His face is sore from smiling and he fills the forms without second thought. First few tours are miles away from any action, what little there was to find in that brief moment of silence. Officer's commission comes fast too, mom hanging on even if dear old dad wouldn't hear a word of the son he always wanted yet never thought he'd have. The army themselves don't question the discrepancies, the notes on his medical records. For all their hand wringing, they're perhaps a little too eager to accept him, especially with all those empty boots and silently unfired rifles left since the Dust War. The familiar sting does happen upon him at times--the odd "fuck off, invert" as he crosses a command bunker, followed by spit splattering his trenchcoat--but he numbs quicker than he ever could at home.
That was before the Immerese invaded. Now he knows a hydra with two faces. One of them is named war, the other laudanum, and when one grew only to offset the terror of the other it can be a ponderous monster to duel. Ironic as it is melancholy, he thinks, that he now lies prone in a hospital bed where they intend to cure him of the very opiate-fuelled malady they loosed upon him in the first place. Said it would ease the coughing, the pain of his chlorine-ravaged lungs. How could they not foresee what he'd eventually use it for, after the things he's seen? At the very least they've covered the rest of the surgeons and serums for him with not so much as a backward look.
Sitting up in bed now, choking on a cigarette with the window open and the polluted air coming in from the Arthurian sprawl, he feels the future strangle in around him. His days in yeomanry are done, lucky to even be signed over to Captain Aloysius Parry's artillerymen. Every now and then, though, he hears a broadcast from the radio or the city watch of a roaming band of air pirates led by shadowy figures in bird masks. Striking hard and ruthlessly with advanced technology and strange affectations only described as witchcraft, then vanishing as fast as they'd appeared. They hit strange targets, seizing objects of curious religious significance or curios of odd provenance, but they are quite thorough and never seem not to hit their mark. And always, they do an awful lot of running.
But that was before he met a woman named Marianne Gascoigne...