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This is a fragment is part of an overall quest to practice writing fiction. The prompt a video called There Will Always Be Monsters.

The Monster / Master dialectic

You aren't as happy as everyone else when the army lays down their weapons. You are even happier.

On the morning when everyone is queueing to hand in their arsenal, you are the first in line. Outside, the snow is thawing on the drones which will never fly again. Inside, the sense of relief is palpable. A young man with no visible military rank on his neck writes your name in large, legible handwriting on a tattered tablet.

The establishment lost, bitterly. When your own platoon members deserted, you gathered their implants in a jar. Fine pieces of hardware that they dug out of each other's flesh. You remember the red-haired explosive expert, and how he massaged your shoulders one evening. "Nobody will know," he said, as he thumbed the edges of your controller through your shirt.

You never told this man that the government excelled at forgetting, not at knowing. It forgot to send supplies and munition. It forgot to back up the medical records of the soldiers on the ground.

In the liberated capital, the trials are advancing slowly. You're in the courtroom every day. You bring cookies, that you baked yourself, to the hearing on Easter. The stenographer is afraid to take one. She looks at your hand and she winces at the missing finger. She has only ever imagined your hand as a weapon, never as anatomy. You feel uncomfortable, because she's forcing herself to take a cookie. You don't want to watch her bite into the cookie, but you do. Her front teeth are missing.

The room you call home has floor tiles reddened by blood, walls darkened by explosives. They tell you this isn't punishment. There aren't enough buildings to house all the commanders standing trial. On the floor above you, five adults raise as many children and you enjoy the constant murmur of voices and footsteps. They keep inviting you for dinner "one day", and you know that means "after the trials. After we find out what kind of monster you really are".

The stenographer keeps smiling at you while she takes down every word in your deposition. One hour on a Friday morning is all you get. Sixty minutes aren't enough, the judge cuts you short. There are no lawyers, only the righteous assembly: your peers and the representatives of the wounded. You went to military school with most of them. You were the guitar tutor for their children.

That weekend, you dine in living room upstairs. They invited the stenographer, and she is tipsy. You don't drink, don't smoke, don't want to be close to her hair because it smells of Malboro so intensely, it makes you nauseous.

The children ask how many people you have killed. Plainly. Curiously. You want everyone to talk to you in this way. With none of the diplomacy that grows on adults like a cancer.

"He only killed his own. Dozens of them. He ordered blood transfusions to go through, even though nobody had medical records anymore. His entire platoon lost more lives than they took, in the capital. Many, many more."

You want to correct her, but you don't.

There are no prisons in the liberated capital. Guilty or not guilty, it doesn't matter. What matters is the truth. The adults upstairs pat themselves on the back for giving you a path back into the graces of society. The stenographer slips you notes when you bag her food at the market, inviting you to her place.

The capital runs on the labour of monster like you. Guilty or not guilty, it doesn't matter. Monsters have no truth of their own.