Lucifer's Angel

‘’Lafayette,’’ Colonel Michaels called, looking up from what he was reading. I stood up from my seat and walked over to his desk, my boots sounding my every move.

‘’Sir,’’ I questioned.

‘’Could you go get Lucienne for me? She should be in Danny’s office,’’ he answered, not looking up from his reading. I took notice of this. Colonel Michaels always looked at people when he was giving orders, or just talking to someone.

‘’Will that be all, chief,’’ I asked. He nodded. He never did that either. He always gave verbal answers.

‘’Sir?’’

‘’What is it, Jean?’’ He looked up this time, making eye contact as he always did.

‘’If you don’t mind my asking, what are you reading,’’ I asked, looking at the paper lying on his desk. It was obvious that whatever it was old due to the faded ink and yellowing at the edges of the page. However, it was clear to see that it’d been taken good care of.

‘’Oh, just an old report from the night Mary’s parents were killed,’’ he explained.

‘’You think they missed something?”

‘’Do you,’’ he retorted.

‘’I wouldn't know,’’ I replied.

‘’It’s not that I think they missed something, it’s more that something may be missing,’ he explained.

‘’Like what, sir?’’ At that, Colonel Michaels closed the stiff file. He leaned back in his chair, kicking his feet up on the desk. He was stressing out much more than he let on. Like everyone under his command, when he was tasked with something, he acted and thought himself fully responsible and because all of us shard this quality, we were sure to leave no room for error.

When something did go wrong, though that was rare, there was little to no animosity between the team. In the beginning, there had been and it’d caused a rather heated argument, but the chief had quickly put a stop to it. Thought it’d taken time, Colonel Michaels had taught all of us to be conscious of each others feelings, and through that, we’d all learned to understand each other. Even more so, we’d come to realize that though we all had different opinion, personalities and reacted differently to certain things, our goals were the same. In the end, the team was one, a unit in its own.

‘’If something is missing, then it was meant to be hidden, kept unknown,’’ he spoke finally, more to himself than to me. In more simplified terms, he meant he had no idea what could’ve been left out. The colonel seemed to be looking at something on his desk. Specifically, it was something that was always on his desk, folded neatly, untouched, and bloodstained. Only I knew what it really was. He’d explained it to me once.

It was a letter written on weather worn paper by a rebel medic during the Great Civil War. Roy had come across the medic when he’d been ordered to destroy a rebel hospital. He’d refused to tell me just how many people he’d had to kill, but he did say that according to his orders, the medic had come last since they were all military and therefore, traitors.

‘’All of them except for one had been military,’’ he’d said. That one in specific, the one who was a civilian, when Roy had come to him, the man had looked Roy’s then nineteen year old self in the eye and told him exactly, ‘’Feel no remorse after you kill me, I am a dead man walking as it is.’’

Then, the civilian, with bloodied hands, handed Roy a letter, asking him to take it to his daughter Illiyan further south for him. Roy took the letter from him and then finished carrying out his orders. As requested by the man, Roy took the letter south only to find the whole town there was completely destroyed and everyone who lived there dead.

Colonel Michaels had had the letter ever since. He’d read it only once, but he’d said that’d been enough for him to remember every word. The words were etched into his mind along with many other memories of the war. Things that he could not forget, things that kept him and many others awake at night.

Now days, of course, I understood that to him, it wasn’t just a letter. He kept it as a reminder, something to keep him on track if he were ever to forget why he’d stayed in the military after all he’d been forced to do, why he’d worked so hard. Though I knew it was impossible, he feared that he would embrace the ‘’monster’’ the war had turned him into.

‘’Warrant Officer Lafayette,’’ Colonel Michaels said, pulling me from my thoughts. He’d easily caught my attention since it wasn’t often that he called my by my official title.

‘’Why are you still here?”