LAZRIEL HISTORY STORAGE

[GABRIEL]

[align=center][div style="width: 500px; text-align: justify; font-size: 9.4pt; line-height: 1.4;"]He was tired. Fucking exhausted, really, and it wasn't quite physical, nothing like after pulling a couple CQ shifts in the barracks or doing recon for three days on four hours of sleep. That had a simple remedy, but this was like tar filling in the spaces between his ribs, burning behind his eyes while lead solidified in his lungs. Everything was so heavy, and the images flashing in the darkness of his closed lids brought him lower than low. Gabe felt purposeless. The world was an amalgamation of monochrome colors, shapes blurring together as much as the lines constituting his life did, and he woke up this morning knowing that tomorrow he would give himself over to the eggheads, let them do whatever it was they did to the soldiers who couldn't find a single reason to keep doing their jobs. Funny that there was a time he pitied the souls who disappeared from the barracks; now all he could do was envy them, commiserate. I feel it too, he would think whenever he passed a newly vacated bed.

This was his last day of freedom, so he took a walk, schedule be damned. The canine went straight for the dregs of this place, easy for him to find considering he'd grown up in them, and nothing much had changed here. Nothing that Gabe had wanted to change, back when he was bright-eyed. There were kids still fighting over scraps, and he watched them scuffle, draw blood. The winner was painfully young, but Gabe didn't look away- too many people did that already, and he wouldn't be one of them. Normally he wouldn't say anything, except...this was his last day. For all he knew, the eggheads would take him apart and never put him back together, so he walked closer, slowly, never once glancing at the bone because he knew that would be interpreted as an urge to steal it.

"Get out of here as soon as you can, kid. Don't lose yourself to this place."