Fighting for your life is like a game. The most important game.

The swings of a sword are like hands pushing pieces across a chess board, hoping that the one that rules stays in power and the queen isn't harmed in the process. The other pieces are fair game, invaluable to you if they aren't going to make you loose. The foot soldiers are your mind, the part that doesn't matter to the players in the end. Who cares if you can't sleep at knight as your mind plays the blood you shed on repeat until you feel the bile rising when there is a war to win. Who cares about the gauntness in your chest , the hollow cheekbones and the sunken eyes when making a wrong move means that you don't matter. Means that you don't exist.

In war.... it will never really end. Sure the peace treaties may be signed, the soldiers go home, they celebrate the lives that they didn't loose....and mourn the ones they did. Then the players go and look for a new war to fight, a new game order and they would win this time, their sure. Then the war never left the ones who lived it, it's in their dreams on most nights. In their nightmares. As shown by the union and the confederacy, the deadliest war we will ever fight, is with ourselves.

A smart man never looks for war, but then again, the brain side was never really his strong suit. If he played his cards right, he would survive another hell, or he would go down fighting. Go down clawing his way out of hell, cause he had lost his mind along time ago. It went with the death that followed him, his own personal plague.

But really if he was being honest with himself, he never really wanted to come home from that, wasn't suppose to come home from the war. If he was really honest, he never really did.

It was all a game to the ones playing, sacrificing their pieces till they could call victory, but when it's real, no one really wins. There was a difference between a victory and a slaughter and that was written on a piece of paper for causal discussion of real life casualties. When a life is valued on who you are and what you can do and not that everyone should be the same. The numbers on a paper are just numbers.

So yeah he never really came home from any of the wars that he fought, it was gone in the wind as he kept sacrificing his pieces and kept pushing off the realization that some of those parts were important. Then reality kept setting in and showing him that he was never going to get that part of himself back. The part that could do no wrong. The part that, once was gone, people turned their backs on a disfigured man. A different man. Sometimes he felt like the monsters he was trained to fight.

They show what they win, but when they seem to loose themselves they push away what they loss and hoping it didn't matter as much as it hurt.

This wasn't really a game, cause there is no restart, and they were real people. Not chess pieces thrown into the fire. Not now. Not ever.

But here he was again, throwing himself into the fire. Quiet literally.

He didn't know why he went in there. Why, before even opening his eyes, did he leap over the edge of the building to scale the outer as the heat seared his back?. Why did he run through to scorched opening like he was 16 and ready to die for assholes in the sky?

And most of all, why did he feel most alive in the moment death could have been so close.

Thick black smoke twirled it's way around him with vengeance, like it's only purpose was to choke him. To gasp for a breath of air as his lungs filled with soot. It was like hell all over again, toxic air, scorching heat. He ran through blindly, looking for stares, for people. He heard a cry from the second story but when he finally found the source, they looked like he had been dipped into a deep fryer. The ash was almost to much for him.

Then he made a decision, a stupid decision really, to climb higher.

He checked through doorways lit with a darkened angry hue, dodged falling beams and leaped dangerously close over columns of fire. His shirt had found it's way to sit on the top of his nose, anything to block out the burning in his throat, it felt too much like everything he wanted to forget.

He ran through an open doorway as he heard a whimper, finding a little girl curled into a ball on the floor. She looked horribly injured with burns running all the way up the right side of her body, her blond hair in patches on her head. Her face was stained with tears, her chest convulsing painfully with sobs. She couldn't have been more than 9.

He knelt down in front of her in a instant, pushing his hands under her hot skin and pulling her up in his arms as gently as possible, then promptly, making a run for it. The smoke had become thicker now and his eyes started to burn a long time ago. That didn't deter him from running as fast as was inhumanly possible.

Then he was in the open air, and he wondered why he hadn't notice before how beautifully cold it was, as the harshness of winter in her full glory. He fell to his knees laying the girls limp body onto the cool concrete. He felt a wave of panic pass through him in the moments that he searched for a pulse, but it was there a beating strong.

She didn't deserve this, none of them deserved this.

He felt red hot anger in his chest, blowing out a piece of air. Who was that man and what kind of person was he if he killed hundreds innocent people in an act of what? Terrorism?

He held his breath as he looked down at the girl, even with the burns she looked so much like-

NO. No don't go there. If he went there he would never get out. So he leaned down and pressed a peck to her forehead before running back into the building, not willing to admit to himself that the tear falling down his cheek wasn't from the burning ash under his eyelids.

Now people can be seen from the outside. You can see the choice of shoe they wear. How they did their hair, and how their shirt doesn't match. A smile. But can you notice, notice the way their footfall looms heaver or how no one seems to hear the steps. Can you notice the way they seem to curl into themselves when something really important falls to the ground. Can you notice how the smile doesn't reach their eyes. Everyone sees the tears, but no one really knows where their from.

Sometimes he didn't even know where they were from.

He heard a scream, a cry for help.

So he ran back into hell, into the fire, into the smoke and ash. The blackness swirling like a thunderstorm on the celling, the flames like lightning but not as sudden. It was too bright to be a thunderstorm though, too sweltering. Comparing the flames to a flash of lightning was as foolish as saying a rock was a mountain.

There were more screams.

He shook his head, trying to block out the pain of breathing. There was people dying in this place and if he didn't get them out or do all could to save them, it would be his fault that they died. It would be on his shoulders that a mom never saw he daughter, or a kid would never again return to school. No, he knew what that felt like. He wouldn't wish it upon anyone.

He followed the voices, the cries for help. He ran back through the falling support beams and the pealing wall paper. he ran because it was what he did, because if he wasn't there to fight in the wars and save innocent people in burning buildings, then what exactly was he for? Useless.

So he ran faster following those screams of helplessness he had spent hours dissecting in the midst of a dessert somewhere in the middle east. Trapped and injured, dying. Back when he was still trying to play hero. Maybe that was what he was still doing. Whatever he was doing, he had heard them often enough, so much he never wanted to hear them again.

There was another wail, a cry of pure misery.

And then the building exploded.