When You Toss Something Out

Zhong Xinyi is an orphan. One day when he was 4 and still barely learning about the world, he learned what it meant to lose something. He and his mother had never been close, him being the product of an unhappy marriage that ended with his mother a widow and his father, well, dead. He could not claim she gave him up out of grief or love, he could not even say she hated him, because every time he looked into her eyes, there was only a wall of ice that seemed to block him from her heart, sight, and mind. She didn't even bother to get out of the car with him, just told him to ring the doorbell and wait for someone to come get him. He watched her drive away and could not even say he felt sad at her leaving. He did as instructed after, rang the doorbell, and waited for someone to come get him.

St. Agretha was the patron saint of childcare in the Mantera religion, she who watched over and protected, but there was no saint in the halls of the orphanage, only shared misery and burden as they all struggled to pitch in to survive the winter. It was in the halls and fields of St. Agretha's Home For The Children that Zhong Xinyi learned to starve, learned to push past the ache in his bones just to do a little more; go a little further. It was also in St. Agretha's that he learned what it was to be cruel, to inflict pain.

Not all adults are terrible, Zhong Xinyi knew this, but it was hard to remind themself of that when one of the caretakers would take another kid's or his own food and then do one of two things with it: A, eat it themselves in the absence of enough food for them to get second; B, feed it to the dogs that kept the children in, and intruders out. Needless cruelty ran rampant within the adult population of St. Agretha, whether it be aimed at the children, the animals, or the other adults. That was not to say the children were all angels, they were children after all, but they all had a sort of non-aggression pact. They were struggling as it was, and being evil to each other just left less hands to help feed themselves. That didn't mean you shared food with the kid whose food was taken, no that was a good way to get yours thrown out as well, but it did mean that kid got a little extra at the next meal to keep their strength up, but only for the next meal.

Life went on like that for the next 11 years for Zhong Xinyi, and sometimes they wondered why, but ultimately it didn't matter. Until it did. The caretakers kicked them out at 15, food running thin, winter dangerously close, and bomber planes getting closer and closer to them with every passing day. They kicked everyone 15 years and older out that day, yelled at them to go join the war effort if they were so hungry, so miserable there. Zhong Xinyi ended up in Unit 15, First Division under Commander Ezra Myers of the Morelan Empire. There were two other kids from the orphanage there, but the silent agreement they had going was that they didn't know each other. They stuck close though, eating close to each other and lining up during basic training together, but never interacting beyond that. No words or names were exchanged, just like back in the orphanage.

Basic training was hard, some days more so than others. Some day reminded them of days in the fields pulling weeds, others of doing needlework with some of the others, in an odd and twisted way. After they got out of basic training Zhong Xinyi was sent immediately to the front lines, fighting an enemy they had never bothered to learn the name of, over something they had never bothered to learn the reason for. They fought and killed and survived that war for 8 years before peace was declared and they were discharged, sent back to a place they didn't have with so little money they would barely be able to find a place to eat. They were promised more money for their service, but the army needed their home address, you see, can't just send some 23-year-old out into the world with a fat wad of cash and no experience with anything besides war. They knew they had read their file, seen the N/A where their home address would have been, and thought up an excuse not to pay them with money the Empire no longer had, all down the drain in an effort to win a war. No one was getting properly paid for this, which made it a little less sour when they walked away.

He ended up on the streets, roaming around, hungry and lost on what to do. The only thing he had to his name was a few coins and paper bills, his uniform which he had not given back knowing he had few changes of clothes, and a backpack that could hold a lot of stuff as well as water. He tried to find a job, but he could barely read and his handwriting was awful. No one wanted to hire a 23-year-old with no education and a background in the military that had unofficially lost the war. The country was suffering and most people, drafted or volunteered, who had been a part of the army were finding it hard to find any job that would take them, and the ones who lost their homes or didn't have one in the first place? They ended up like him, or worse.

It was on the night of his 24th birthday that he decided he was absolutely done with being hungry, with being weak, with losing muscle mass and fat, to being cold, to being stared at weirdly. Life meant nothing to him at this point, it hadn't ever meant much in the first place, but now he was tired. So, so tired. This was the type of tired you couldn't fix either. Not with sleep, or drugs, or sex. He had never enjoyed a single day of his 23 years of life, and he was tired. So, he did what tired people did, and he went to sleep.

It is a wonder what they let you take home from the military when they know they're going to screw you over. He stared out into space as he checked and rechecked the cartridge, he needed to make sure it didn't jam afterall. It would be very rude of Mr. Colt to jam while he was trying to take a nap, now wouldn't it. He didn't look down the barrel, in fact he never looked up from where his hands had been checking the cartridge. He moved not an inch as he pulled the trigger, body only hitting the ground under the bridge once the bullet had gone all the way through.