The uniform fit. Somehow, that was the most terrifying part of it. What kind of army made military uniforms to fit 11-year-old kids? Well, the Fire Nation apparently. I've been in this damn school for a little over a month now and it seems it's not just the slums that's made up of mostly kids. The military academy too by the looks of it. At least the academy they had inside the inner walls. I never realized how different an entire city could be when you crossed a few feet of steel plate wall. There wasn't trash lining the street. There weren't dead children rotting in the alleyways, attracting all means of vermin from rats to humans.
I didn't have to worry about my next meal or where I could get some water to get the lump of dryness out of my throat. It was all just some long gone foreign concern that didn't affect me anymore. I was beyond that. So why the hell did I feel like shit? I've been here for over a month and every time I woke up in that shared bunkroom, I nearly had a heart attack when it wasn't the sandcrete walls of the Hive around me, when there weren't 20 or so flies hovering around my shit bucket I had to swat out of the way to take a morning piss. No. I slept in a feather bunk, inside an insulated military complex, within a district surrounded by double layered steel walls, surrounded by that sandcrete hell. Did I feel safe? Hell no, I didn't.
I thought that it was adrenaline in the first few days. That I was having some problem getting over the last battle, much more the last 11 years of my life. Then, I thought it would just take some getting accustomed to. It wasn't. It's because not all of my old life was left behind, bleeding to death on that dirt floor. 2 weeks ago, I saw Danev again, alive. I never saw his corpse, I realized later. I had taken Janick's words to be the truth when he told me he killed him. "Just shit he said to fuck with you." Danev told me after I told him about how I had thought he was dead.
Danev was dragged into the military district just like I was, half dead. He was in the medical bay for longer though, over 3 weeks by the looks of it. He showed me his scars, the one on his shoulder, one on his brow, and another on his ankle. I showed him the one from the arrow that went through my leg and the other from the spear. That's what set us apart from every other kid in this school of warfare. We had actually seen war. Not a war between two armies on a battlefield, but one far worse. One far more brutal. A war between savages with no ulterior motive save the total annihilation of the enemy. That's the kind of war we had seen.
We recognized the looks we got from the other children. They saw us and saw savages, slum rats. Who could blame them? They were right. We got those looks as we dressed in our barracks. Got them as they passed the table where Danev and I sat during meals. Got them still as I passed them in the hallways. I realized then it wasn't just hatred. It was fear. They kept their distance. I saw the curve they took as I walked passed them in the hallways, hugging the wall to avoid me. I saw their bunks slowly moving away from mine over the days as though I'd slit their throats in their sleep. Maybe I would. It was just a joke thought I'd have every now and then. Thought maybe I'd try and scare them. See how they reacted. They were just kids like me, they'd buy it. The teenagers on the other hand. That wasn't fear that their faces showed. It was hatred. They had different bunks, a different floor on the Citadel, but in passing, I'd hear the names they'd whisper, or hell, the name's they'd yell. They hated us and weren't shy to make it known.
Classes hadn't started yet. I spent 2 weeks in recovery. 2 in private classes where they saw how much I knew and how much I didn't. To their surprise, I knew how to read and write. Only thing I needed catching up on was Fire Nation culture and history as well as math. I had finished the basic classes just a few days ago and from what Danev told me, he was taking the same courses, having much less of a fun time than me.
I think I was the only one in the military district who found the class exciting. The other students in my class, those taking intensive history due to failing the actual course, slept through the class and the teacher didn't even care. She spouted the names, dates, and events as though she had said it a million times over. She probably had. The textbook they assigned us was the first book I had ever held. It was heavier than I imagined. I read through it in a week. It wasn't long. The Fire Nation had only been what it was for a little over a thousand years. Before that, it was an assortment of independent city states. Before that, small towns. Before that, tribes. Then before that was the Lion Turtles. That's the part they didn't print in the textbooks. I found that in the libraries. There was no one specific text that noted this as the Fire Nation's origins, but I put the events together. The first human settlements, the first harmonic convergence, all of it. It fit together too well.
It was something about history that interested me. The culture, and what they reflected of man. Politics and how they represented society and psychology. Government, and the nations they reflected. And War. Most of all war. War displayed all of these things. Culture, politics, government. Basically, what man was. There were the first unification wars of the Fire Nation when they city states all fought amongst each other for control, but a Fire Bender of extraordinary abilities unified the states and created the Fire Nation, crowning himself Fire Lord. The Civil War between the Royal Family and the Fire Island League that attempted to secede from the Fire Nation. I knew it was biased. All in favor of the Royal family, I assumed. But events did happen. I knew a civil war did happen and that the Nation was unified through war. What I couldn't trust was what caused these wars and what ended them. Nonetheless, it was history.
For me classes started in 3 days. We were in the middle of some holiday that celebrated the founding of the first Fire Bender settlement on the land rather than a lion turtle's back. I didn't know what to expect in all honesty. I knew it would be hostile. I wasn't stupid. The extent to which I couldn't say. I was preparing for the worst.
3 days past and classes began. I got my schedule. It was basics. Math, history, literature. It was about as hostile as I had expected. I was seated in the back of my classes. I was never called on to speak and if I was, it was only for the questions they knew I didn't know. I knew what this was, but I wasn't fighting it. It was this or being back out in the slums, beating some kid to death for a scrap of meat. I wasn't complaining. But they were.
I was an afterthought in those classes. I wasn't grouped, I wasn't chosen, I wasn't accounted for. This wasn't shit that got me crying in a corner, wondering why I had no friends. It got me pissed. I knew why I was here and they made no effort of proving me wrong. I was a soldier here and these were technicalities. These classes weren't for me. They were for paperwork. The second I passed these classes, they would stick me in the other classes. The real classes. This was a military school. Everybody knew that. When I finished my classes and headed back to barracks, the rest of the kids bore their Fire Nation uniforms proudly and reported for duty. I was sent back to my barracks where I studied the math I knew, the history I had already memorized, and the books I had already read.
Danev joined the teenagers in their class. We had different barracks, different classes, different floors. For all intents and purposes, he was dead. I hadn't decided if I was glad to see him yet or not. When I saw him that first time, passing in a hallway, it was a happy reunion to be sure. There was hugging, maybe a few tears, questions as to what happened that day, all of it. I had said before that the reason I felt so out of place was because not all of my past was left in the slums. Some of it still walked around in the same building as me. I finally came to a decision that it wasn't a bad thing. It was the one thing that made me different from all these other kids who were born and raised in the lap of luxury. I knew everything they were preparing me for. I knew survival. I knew what war was. The only thing they had to teach me was how to fight their war. I acknowledged where I came from. It wouldn't slow me down and I wouldn't let it be used against me. I wasn't trained from birth to be a soldier, I was raised in a battleground to be a soldier, a survivor. This wasn't any difference and Danev and I had the one thing no other kids in this city had, experience.
I was ready for this.