your father isn't coming home for a while , his mother tells him in one breath, all hollow eyes and shaking hands, and Noah thinks the first lesson he ever should have learned when he still had a father, is to take care of himself.

she makes waffles for breakfast, using the good flour and the expensive white sugar that his father always saved for Noah's birthday, and she spends the next half hour making sure he has enough syrup and that Noah's bites of waffle aren't too big for him to chew.

(maybe if he were older he would tell her that she doesn't have to cut his waffles into pieces for him anymore, like his father never did and she hasn't done since he was four. he's almost ten now, and almost a man his father would say, and he can cut his own waffles.)

"they're coming, aren't they?" he asks her around a mouthful of food, with his eyes focused on his plate, fingers sticky as she hands him his fork.

"they're coming to take me away."

his mother's plate remains untouched and her eyes are dry, but her lower lip quivers, the smallest sign that she's nearly crying.

"oh baby, no. no one is coming to take you away from me, do you hear?"

tears are starting to leak down her cheeks.

(maybe if he were older, he would notice how her hands shake when she takes his hands in hers.)

"oh," Noah says, frowning, and he's suddenly unsure if it's okay to ask his other question.

"when is papa coming home?"

his mother is crying now, and it's because he knows her the way he knows her that he can see the answer written in every line of her face. her shoulders are shaking in tiny, small motions under Noah's hands. they make her hands look so big in comparison.

she kisses the top of his head, maybe because his papa isn't coming back, and Noah feels the tears fall free.

the men and women in their coats and polished boots come for Noah when he is just seventeen years old: he and five other boys his age join the army as just six out of a hundred of fresh-faced recruits.

(his mother cries when they take him away, Noah is yelling, and he hates his father more than he's ever hated anyone in his life because he didn't come back, and they're taking him away.)

you might live. you're small, smaller than most of them. you could easily be missed in the ranks and on the battlefield. maybe you're lucky .

they are the first words spoken to him, seventeen and barely grown out of the grasps of youth and into the hardness synonymous with being a man, traces of innocence not yet wiped off his face in a jawline that slopes gently and not sharp, and the scraggly signs of stubble on his chin.

(he looks the part of a young boy on the battlefield. Noah kills his first ogre and his eyes widen, blue like his mother's, and then his legs shake as he stands there trying to reason himself out the urge to vomit, doubled over and clutching his knees in white knuckled fists.)

they warned him- fighting isn't pretty.

Noah's sure his mother would try to comfort him, if she could.

they didn't tell him how it would smell: like sweat and smoke and iron in his mouth, the feeling of mud on his arms, apologies in his throat.

there are curses and prayers and calls for help, his name in the middle of it, blood and bodies everywhere, and the sky is blood-red to match. faces he might know, one body in particular, a boy who grew up in the same village, his eyes clouded in death: he had been spared the horror of watching his friends die, but he is dead all the same.

Noah is lying in the dust a few feet away from him: not hurt, just barely conscious.

the ogres hit them pretty good this time. they hit back, but the ogre they had cornered is still standing, and Noah is on his knees, one hard-heeled palm pressed against the dirt, cursing, and he knows in his gut how this scenario will end, even before he feels the ground...