Hell And Back

Chapter 1

I don't make a habit of discussing certain things because, quite frankly, some shit is best left in the past. Still, now and then, even a perceived hard ass like me needs to vent some things. Maybe it's to set records straight, or maybe it's therapeutic—what it isn't, I'll tell you flat out, is a vie for any sympathy. Again, the past is the past and pitying me for shit that happed nearly fourteen years back isn't going to serve either you or me.

But I've got a story to tell.

If the ultimate outcome of this is that you understand where I'm coming from a little better, then that's just a side bonus. Mostly, I'm just writing this for me. I'm not getting any younger, and before my memories are stripped away by time, I reckon I ought to put pen to paper, spill my guts, and cry in my tea.

As you may have heard, I lied about my age to join the Shin Ra Air Force when I was just sixteen years old. I proved myself worthy, though, and climbed the ranks. This was facilitated by the fact that Shin Ra, at the time, had gotten themselves into a war with Wutai. Worthy pilots were becoming a scarce breed, since the Wutain antiaircraft defenses were legendary. By the age of twenty, I was an accomplished combat pilot, and made the rank of Captain.

All the while, back home, my high school sweetheart, Sarah Jane kept the home fires burning for me. I got some leave around my nineteenth birthday and went home to marry her. Right after that, I was deployed back into the fight that still raged between Shin Ra and Wutai.

The next time I saw Sarah Jane was almost a year later. I got leave after pulling some strings and went to spend some time at home with her. Sadly, that would prove to be the last time I would be with her. The first night I was home, she suffered an aneurysm in her sleep, and I awoke to find her dead.

Needless to say, the military extended my leave for a while so I could bury my wife and grieve for a time. During times of war, though, reprieves from work for a soldier are short lived at best and, before long, I was right back to the fight.

My life became completely and utterly devoted to my combat flying. I had nothing else really to live for after Sarah's passing. Besides, I loved it.

And if there was ever one thing I was the best at, it was flying.

By the time I was twenty one, the war had been raging for five years. Though I wasn't the oldest pilot in the conflict by far, I had twice as many kills as the next highest ace. I'd also been given command of several bombers, and had successfully completed over sixty-eight bombing runs. The record before me had been forty-two, the pilot holding that number going down in a blaze of glory on the forty-third.

With my record and my ability, I should have made a much higher rank, but Shin Ra purposefully kept me as just a captain, since they didn't want me coming off the frontline anytime soon. Fucking politics.

Either way, it was on my ill fated sixty-ninth bombing run that this story really begins.

I awoke at 0300 hours, to head to my preflight briefing. I was to lead a squadron of seven bombing airships over Wutai, to try and land a direct strike against their capital city. I knew the map of that country like the back of my hand by then. Though many of my previous runs had been to clear the path for this particular raid, I still had no illusions that it was going to be simple. In fact, I had a nagging ache in my gut that morning like I'd not known for some time.

There wasn't much time to dwell on that though, since it was only an hour later that I was at the controls of the flagship, heading off east toward our target. We had an escort of about twenty smaller combat aircraft, the type I'd piloted before being given control over the bombers. Naturally, I knew a lot of my guys weren't going to make it home from that one but… but that's war.

It wasn't until after dark, about sixteen hours after we'd taken off, that we were over Wutai. It was a long, exhausting haul to fly that far but I was a younger man and found it doable.

Shortly after crossing over into Wutai, we started to encounter resistance. The boys in our fighter escort did a damn fine job, though, leaving me and the other bomber pilots just to worry about the antiaircraft fire that occasionally burst in the sky around us. My ship was peppered a good amount, but she was a tough old bird, heavily armored, and the flak was just more of an annoyance to the big girl.

Our target came into range and I lead the charge, being the first to drop payload on the city. I was rewarded with a massive orange bloom below a few minutes later, showing that my crew had hit the mark as always. My fellow bombers dropped their munitions as well, and I let myself get a little cocky for a second.

We'd all made it in without any casualties.

Before I got the shot to pat myself on the back too long, something rocked my ship violently. The following moments are sort of a haze, but I remember one of my fighter escorts radioing me.

"Highwind, an enemy fighter just kamakazied into your port side lift rotor! You're burning!"

My number was up, I reckoned. I looked over at my navigator, Lieutenant Curt Flemming, and we both collectively had one of those "Oh shit" moments.

My ship began to go down. As tough as she was, she couldn't stay airborne after a direct hit from another aircraft to one of her two lift rotors. Instantly off balance, she began to spin as she fell from the sky. I closed my eyes and prayed for what God would will in that moment. With the way she was spiraling out of the air, there was no way either Flemming or myself were going to be able to bail out. All I could do was hope somehow that maybe our bombardier or gunners were going to get out alive. We had a crew onboard of six souls, total.

I don't recall much after that, I reckon I blacked out.

When I awoke, it was to the sound of screaming. I opened my eyes to realize that somehow, I'd survived the crash. The morning sun was just beginning to creep up, giving an orange light to the scene. Copious amounts of black smoke were wafting over the wreckage, and I heard the screaming again. Though I'd broken the fibula in my left leg, I tried to crawl toward the source of that cry.

I knew it was Flemming from the voice. "Help! Oh God… please… someone… Captain!"

He wasn't really that far away from me, but he was pinned badly in the metal. The torso of our aft gunner was lying close, but he was obviously dead, Flemming needed my help. I struggled to uncover him, horrified at what I was confronted with.

Lt. Flemming wouldn't have been recognizable on sight alone. He'd been burned—I knew, I absolutely knew, he was a dead man from the extent of what had happened to him. Still, ignoring my busted leg, I just sat there, holding the hand he'd lifted toward me.

Like a lot of men in that sort of situation, he asked me how badly he was hurt.

…and, like a lot of men in the position of being asked that, I lied. "It's all right, Curt… they'll send someone in to get us. Yer jus' a little burned… Jus' hold on."

At the very least, he seemed to calm a little and didn't scream anymore.

I knew damn good and well that we were so deep into Wutai there would be no rescue. The fact was that we would be found sooner or later, and either killed or hauled off into a POW camp. Had I been alone, even with the broken leg, I would have made the effort to hide but…

…I wasn't leaving Flemming like that. Not a cold chance in hell.

Sure enough, it wasn't long after that when the quiet of the morning was broken by the shouts of Wutain soldiers. They had zero sympathy for either Flemming or myself. He was pulled, unceremoniously, from the wreckage, and we were made to walk. Truth be told, I practically carried the man for the two hour hike back to the camp. With a broken fibula, I wasn't exactly tearing up the path, either, but at least my leg wasn't completely broken, since my tibia was still intact. I could see that there wasn't a whole lot left of Curt's lower right leg at all, so I was just thankful to be better off than he.

Once at the POW camp, we were interrogated. I refused to give any information other than my name and rank. Despite the shape Flemming was in, he did the same. I can't express how proud I was of him, though it was tempered with the knowledge he had to be dying.

We were quickly inspected after that, and they put a splint on my leg, and covered Curt in bandages. Then they marked us.

It was a matter of public record that the Wutains tattooed ID numbers onto their POWs. I fought as they approached me with the damn branding gun. My fight was cut short, though. I was bound as it was, and then when one of the guards kicked my broken leg to get my attention… well… it got my mother fucking attention.

Soon, there was a sting to my left temple, the permanent mark having been made. I was Wutain property, and I knew the chances of me ever getting back home were slim. The Wutains were not known for their hospitality when it came to POWs.

Before long, my right wrist was shackled to Flemming's left, and the two of us were thrown into a small cell. It wasn't big enough for me to stand in, not that I could have, given the fact I was chained to Flemming, and he wasn't getting up.

Night came along and we were given a teacup full of rice. Curt was barely coherent, the pain he must have been in, I can only imagine. I fed him all that we'd been given in some sort of futile gesture.

It was hot there, and the insects were intolerable. There was constantly something crawling on me, and I did my best to keep the damn things off of Flemming, but they were determined to get beneath the bandages he'd been covered in.

To my surprise, he was still alive the following morning. The dressings on his body were a sickly orange color though, and wet. I was hoping that at some point they'd at least come along and change his bandages, since they'd bothered to put some on him in the first place. The day came and went, though, and nothing. Watching him made it easier for me to ignore the pain in my leg.

…and somehow, Curt was still alive. Every few hours he'd come around enough to say something or other to me, and I would just try to assure him that we'd be rescued. That night, we were given a piece of something similar to hardtack bread. As I'd done with the rice, I fed it all to Flemming.

I don't know if you've ever had the unfortunate circumstance of having to be near someone that has been virtually cremated. It was bad enough that the cell area we were confined to had no bathroom facilities… but the stench of being kept in our own waste, coupled with the smell of burnt flesh—it was close to the ninth level of Hell. I thought it couldn't get much worse.

But it did.

By the third day, a new odor joined in. It was the reek of Flemming literally beginning to rot from infection. How on God's Earth he was still alive I didn't know. Luckily, by that point he was blind. The burns to his face had messed with his eyes or tear ducts to the point where his eyes were just dry and gray. I say that he was lucky because it spared him from seeing that he was being eaten alive. There were maggots falling out of his bandages. I tried at one point to take those dressings off of him but it caused him so much pain that…

I honored his pleas for me to stop.

Curtis Flemming, First Lieutenant, and a close friend of mine, kept right on fighting. I know anyone else would have died within the first day, but he was tough. It wasn't until the sixth day that he seemed to finally resign to his fate.

"Cid… please… kill me…" he begged.

I wish I could have, I really do. "Curt… c'mon, guy… they'll be here any minute to take us home."

"Just strangle me, Captain, please…" His dead, gray eyes were in my direction, sending a twinge of horror through me.

"No, an' don't ask me again," I said, trying to sound resolute.

"Yes, Sir."

He didn't ask me again. In fact, he didn't say anything else to me at all. Though he'd lived for close to a week in that physical state, by nightfall he was succumbing. Toward sunset, he'd started having seizures. I'm not a doctor so I can't explain a lot, other than I reckoned that the infection had just finally gotten into his brain.

The seizures got progressively worse, and though I was reluctant to touch him, I did my best to hold him down, since his thrashing was tearing off bandages as well as chunks of decaying flesh from his body.

In the middle of the night, those seizures began to weaken and mercifully, they stopped all together when he died. That was a hard moment, since he was the last fragment of my life before the prison camp there was. His was the only English speaking voice I had to hear.

I'd figured that in the morning the guards would see that he was dead and take him away.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

Sure, they knew he was dead, but they left him right there in that tiny, filthy cage with me.

…for a week.

They still offered me bits of food but, I'd nearly always vomit within an hour of eating, so awful were my circumstances. The smell was so God awful, not one that you could acclimate to. No, it was always there, thick in the air, worse by the minute.

Being trapped with a festering corpse fucks with you. Needless to say, my own wounds became infected, and I began the ritual of pulling maggots off of myself as they would swarm over from Curt's body in the night. More than once I swore I heard him saying things to me. It's a matter of fact that a dead body will produce noises as they bloat and expand. Curt would groan, bletch… and I'm sure with a little imagination you can figure out what else it did as the gasses within built up.

At the end of that week, I was able to unchain myself from Flemming's body. Only by virtue of the fact that his hand decayed to the point where the tissue on it sloughed off, making it easy to slip off the shackle from his wrist.

I knew I had to get out or die.

When the guard came by that night with my miniscule ration of rice, I laid by the front of the cage, trying to act too weak to move. He reached down to set the bowl in front of my cell, after which he traditionally pushed it inside with his boot. However, once he set it down, I sprung to life and reached for him as quickly as I could.

I took him by surprise and got a hold of his arm, pulling him against the bars. There was a bowie knife he carried on his belt, and in a fluid motion, I grabbed it, and then brought it up and drove it into his neck, cutting off his cries for help. He fell dead before my cell within seconds.

The guards that fed us didn't carry keys for the obvious reason that we'd try to get them. Still, given the crude nature of my enclosure, and having that sizable knife, I quickly set to trying to pry open the latching mechanism.

By the grace of God alone, I popped that lock open. Not having been able to stand for nearly two weeks, and still being pained by my leg, those first steps out were agonizing. Being that it was dark, I couldn't make out a lot. My cell had been inside a small fenced in area, and I passed a few others as I ran. They held nothing but dead men.

I got over the low fence and headed into the forest, getting as far as I could before I collapsed in sheer exhaustion.

It was a joke… When morning broke I realized I was resting up against another fence. The first barrier I'd scaled had just enclosed the cages. This perimeter fence had extended into the trees, and I'd probably run in circles the night before. The second fence was not something I was going to get over in my state, and I knew it.

I considered the knife I held for a good, long time. It was a way out, and I won't lie, I gave it some serious thought. All I had to do was cut somewhere that would count, and I'd be done with it.

Something stopped me, though, and I just stabbed the blade down into the dirt next to where I'd sat. Sure enough, guards came for me, guns drawn, a few minutes later. I was just too Goddamned tired to fight.

My little escape attempt earned me a good beating, but it wasn't without its benefit. See, after they were done kicking me around, I was taken to a different area of the camp. I was thrown into a different cage, one that I notably, did not have to share with a decedent. Still, having to wallow in piss soaked mud wasn't ideal, but being away from poor old Curt had its charms.

The next day, I was pulled out of my cell and put into slave labor. Maybe they figured that if I was well enough to kill a guard and run that I was fit enough to work. Why they didn't just kill me I don't really know, unless they figured I was a good bargaining chip. Bum leg or not, they saw it fit to use me as a fucking farm animal.

Since the war had been raging for close to five years, and Wutai had been hurting economically, sheer survival had driven them to eat most of their livestock, including the working animals. Being that it was still a fairly… unsophisticated agrarian society… they didn't have machinery to work their fields.

So, I found myself soon harnessed to a fucking plow that I had to drag through acres of rice paddies. The little bastard that became my 'handler' was a mean son of a bitch. He used a driving whip to keep my ass on course as I hauled that small plow back and forth, day after day.

I noticed, though, that the amount of area I was able to cover in a given day directly translated to an increase of the food I was given. On a good day, I'd be granted not only a decent sized bowl of rice, but even a small cup of tea. Having anything other than the piss tainted water on the cage floors to drink was like heaven.

After several days in the new cage, in the night, I came to realize that I was hearing Morse Code tapped out. There were other men near me, but the line of sight between the cells was blocked, and we were strictly forbidden from speaking.

To dare and try to call out to another man promptly got you urinated on by one of the guards at best, and at worst… well, I never bothered to find out what 'at worst' was.

It wasn't easy training myself to make out Morse Code without something to write on, but since time was all I had on my hands, I learned. The guards didn't understand that our faint tapping was out and out communication, so we were able to get away with it. I learned that none of the men there were from my bombing mission. That gave me hope that the others might have made it home. The guys there had all been captured at different points in the war, and were all of my rank or higher. During the work day, I'd occasionally see the other men, but since we were never allowed to talk, I didn't know who was who, though I had a good list of names in my brain from our coded messages.

There was a guy amongst us, by the name of Colonel John Laron, who was our self appointed record keeper. The man was able to remember to the day the length of each of our incarcerations. John, himself, had been there the longest, nearly four years. I never asked him to remember the length of my term there, though. I really didn't want to know, but I knew it was getting to be a long time.

It was clear that Shin Ra wasn't coming for us.

Every few days, one of our compatriots would stop tapping messages. That was a sign to us that the man in question was dead. Inevitably, though, they would be replaced with a new victim, and that was the extent of our social interactions. Tapping on the bars.

Being out and working in the wet conditions I was in, I still continued to have infected lesions on my body. Some nights I'd be up, shivering. Not that it was cold out, I don't think it ever got below 85 degrees F there, but because I'd get fevers. I knew I was sick not only from my infected wounds, but undoubtedly I'd contracted Malaria since I was covered in mosquitoes as a matter of course.

Things were just grim.

Then, it happened.

There seemed to be a commotion and I could hear the various cells being opened up. Soon, a man that I'd come to appreciate as the leader of the POW camp, came and unlocked my door. I was herded with the other survivors and we were all sent to march.

We figured that our time was up, and that we were being sent out to our executions, though not a word passed between us. Being lead to an open field by our armed guards, I reckoned we were just minutes away from being shot full of holes and left to rot.

We weren't, though. The guards stood by, but didn't do anything. The other men and I were all so programmed not to speak that we kept our silence.

And then I heard it.

The unmistakable drone of a military transport airship.

When the drab green bird appeared over the tree line, well, that was damn near a religious moment for us. She landed before us in the field, and honest to God Shin Ra soldiers emerged, ushering the lot of us onto the craft.

The insides of those old transports were Spartan at best, with just nylon mesh seats along the walls. I staggered over to one near a tiny round window. I collapsed into my seat, and rested my head against the glass, the blessed feeling of getting airborne again pulling at my stomach.

Though I didn't look, I could hear several of the other guys break down and start sobbing. I won't lie, I myself had tears running down my cheeks as I watched the ground grow further away. The thought we were finally free… well, there's nothing in the world that can compare to that.

Nothing.

There were medics on the ship that made the rounds, checking each of us. They'd ask each man his name and rank, then radioing that information back to Shin Ra.

When they came to me, I got the same routine as the other men. "Name and rank."

Not having spoken in God knows how long, it took me a second to find my voice. "Captain Cid Highwind."

The medics stopped and looked at each other. "Captain Highwind?"

I flashed them an annoyed but exhausted glare. "Ya deaf?"

One of them took up the radio. "We have Captain Highwind."

I looked to the other man for some sort of explanation.

He gave it to me. "Sir, your entire squadron was lost, but your bombing run seven months ago obliterated the Wutain's ability to manufacture arms. That's what finally brought them to the negotiation table. You're a hero. A truce was finally declared last night, hence why you're all going home now."

Seven bombers with crews of six, and twenty escorts with crews of two; eighty two men, of which I was the only survivor. Pardon me if I wasn't overjoyed to hear I was a fucking hero. A lot of men, far better than me, had died on that mission. I had no right to be alive. All I hoped was that the others died the night of the bombing run and hadn't been left to suffer like Lieutenant Flemming.

I never really knew.

To hear that I'd been there for seven months… while that was a long time, it'd felt like I'd been there for years. Still, it made me appreciate others like Colonel John Laron who had been there for years that much more.

It was like a dream to be going home. All I wanted was a plate of catfish, a cigarette, and a good, long shower.

((A/N- There will be a chapter two. I guess my damn Cid muse couldn't let me rest for very long.))