APH Union

~Union~

It was freezing in this dark place; there was a window, but the sunlight never seemed to penetrate the bars across it. It smelled of mold and damp hay, and the only distant sounds were of men sobbing and metal doors creaking. His body felt sore and heavy and he couldn't breathe. His wrists hurt, being tightly wrapped in cold irons and weighed down by heavy chains. He was scared, but somehow this place was far preferable to whatever unknown lay beyond this one.

Suddenly, the metal door separating him from that unknown beyond opened, and men in grey coats filed in. Fear, true icy cold fear, coiled in his stomach and he pushed himself as far from these men as he could – his back hitting a frozen wall as his body trembled for reasons beyond instinct he couldn't understand.

The men advanced, and he couldn't stop them when they reached down and took hold – grabbing him viciously and painfully digging unyielding fingers into his skin. He wanted to cry out, but his throat was paralyzed and he could scarcely breathe. He struggled, but it was useless as they only pulled him harder and forced him to his feet before dragging his flailing body from the room.

All at once there was light – burning, terrible light that scalded his eyes and forced him to shut it out, as it only added to his pain. The earlier sound of the distant sobbing was now enveloping him and evolving into screaming, shrieks of terror and pleas for mercy. He wanted to cry and plead too, but he still could not make sounds beyond his staccato gasping. The world was soon deteriorating as the men dragging him began hauling him up a rise leading out of that cold, dark place and into a very different world.

The light was soon the most oppressive governor of his senses; the sun beating down on him like a forger's hammer – burning his skin and cutting into his brain. His captors roughly yanked him back onto his feet, and it was only then he realized he had fallen to the ground. For that brief moment he remembered what real earth felt like, but too soon that short-lived blessing was gone. They were still moving him, taking him somewhere, and slowly he managed to open his eyes enough to make out the blurred shapes around him.

The sight made him wish he were blind again.

Men dressed in their military and gentleman's finest were gathered in rows on either side of him, making an aisle for the men dragging him to lead him down. Men of every size, shape, and age were present, all of them looking at him with expressions of disgust, hatred and mild curiosity – but they all had two colors in common: white and grey. And before them all, looking like a great sacrificial altar to an alien god, was a huge wooden scaffold with a noose swinging lightly in a breeze he couldn't feel.

His breath hitched and his heart stopped at the sight. The world narrowed down to that one fatefully beckoning rope and the man in black standing next to it – a priest who might as well have been an executioner.

They were leading him up the steps now, but he didn't want to go and suddenly remembered how to fight. His muscles tensed and he dug his heels into the wooden planks, sending one of his subjugators off balance and causing both of them to fall. He barely felt the impact or heard the shouts of commotion in his panic, but regardless of his efforts his delay was only that, and soon the butt of a rifle slammed into the side of his head and removed what little spirit remained in him.

He only remembered being weightless for a time before reality returned as he was dropped down into a chair. Everything inside his skull was throbbing and the haze of his vision was tinged with red. He swayed in his seat, teetering until a hand clamped down onto his shoulder and forced him to sit straight. The foul smell of sour breath and hot curses assaulted him, but worse was the sudden piercing wetness on his cheek from someone having spat on him. He tried to shake filth and the disorientation off, but all the move did was increase the nausea plaguing his stomach, and he had to turn away from the brightness of the crowd before him.

He heard footsteps of someone walking up onto the platform and a loud, booming voice began reading off something official, but his mind just couldn't stay focused as his eyes fell upon the ground to the north of him…and suddenly he couldn't hear anything anymore.

Twenty-two. There were twenty-two plots dug out of the earth and less than half of them where already covered…while the rest still had empty wooden coffins resting next to them. He stared…and stared at them…but the terrible mixture of horror and morbid fascination would not release him.

He was going to die today, and this is where he would be buried. Right here in this horrible place, so intolerably cold and burning all at once, he beheld his own grave. He was going to be confined for eternity beneath the earth of this terrible prison full of people who hated him, cursed him, and now damned him because he did not wear grey. He would share his fate with twenty-one others he did not know, but all of whom shared his crime of allegiance, and still he felt terrible loneliness grip him.

He was about to die and all he could think about was how lonely it would be to be buried in a place like this, where no one he knew or loved would be beside him in death and the living could never visit. He would be a hated memory within a forgotten box, hidden away beneath an unmarked plot of dirt. His heart broke, and he no more cared about the tears falling from his eyes than he did about the jeers of the men beside him.

"By order of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, and carried out under the authority of General Major George Edward Pickett…you are hereby sentenced to be executed for the crime of treason against the great state of North Carolina and the Confederacy."

The indictments never took seed in his heart, because in his heart he knew the truth that he had never committed any treason. The men in grey, those who his native state had sided with, had only wanted to secede from the country he considered home. In his heart he had done the right thing by choosing to forward the ideals of the Union, of a Union, of being whole again as it was in a time without war. He had made the choice to wear blue because he had believed in doing what was best for the people and home he loved more than anything…

Now, he was going to die for it.

They may have asked him for last words but he had none to give. The tears continued to fall as someone placed a canvas bag over his head and tightly fitted the noose around his neck. The men on either side of him grabbed his arms again and stood him up, forcing him forward before withdrawing and leaving him bound and isolated at the edge of the dais.

He was alone again, so very alone and in total darkness, just as he would be for eternity…

His hands clenched and his stomach tightened. His heart was pounding and the bag was stifling. All he could hear was the sound of his own quickened breaths and his blood rushing through his veins. He was scared, so scared. He didn't want to die but there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He was going to die…and no one beyond these people who hated him would know it.

"Amen."

The world beneath his feet was gone, and he screamed. He kept screaming and screaming until his lungs gave out, and the moment he could draw breath again he screamed even louder – trailing off into gut-wrenching sobs.

He had awakened once again, alone and in the dark, smelling the stale air of an enclosed world devoid of freedom. He was cold again, freezing and collapsed on the floor of his all too familiar cell, drenched in sweat and tears. He raised a shaking hand from where it remained buried in a crater in the concrete and watched the blood of his wounds drip from where the skin had split upon impact. He'd been fighting again in his night terrors, trying to change events from times and places he knew not where in relation to the present…and another sob escaped him.

That boy who had died – whom he had died with – had been number eight…eight of twenty-two he had to die with, and he curled in upon himself where he lay, holding himself with his trembling arms as if it might help shield him from the terrible plague of this war ripping his mind apart. He had never felt more agony or loneliness in his life, and each time he stood upon a scaffold or laid in a trench with one of his dying soldiers he knew they felt that horrible pain too. He wanted so badly for this all to end, even though he knew that it wouldn't matter which side of his rifted country won…the pain of defeat was his to feel regardless.

Grey or blue, Rebel or Yank, Confederacy or Union; every soldier in this conflict had been born American and died as such. Every soldier that took to the battlefield and tore the landscape of his nation asunder was ripping the flesh from his bones, and every American life held a piece of his soul that tormented him in ways beyond mortal comprehension when suffering or lost.

He was dying, yet he could not die. He was so exhausted but could not sleep. He could neither remember the time nor day, nor could he recall the last time he truly saw the outside of his prison. He had been brought here for his own protection and for others to be protected from him…but really; there was no sparing him or his people anything.

This war tore him apart despite these stone walls, just as it tore this nation apart in spite of all of his government's efforts to stop it.

Hopeless. He had…never felt so hopeless in his life…and somehow that was far worse than the nightmares and the pain. Another sob escaped him and he closed his eyes, turning his head away from the door that would never open, and resigned himself to wait for the next soldier to be brought before the hangman's noose and die…for trying to make him whole again.

~Fin~