Cappuccino Cuts

Kail halted mid-step, his boots grinding against the shattered asphalt, and for a moment, he stood motionless. His back was to her, shoulders slack, his silhouette a statue amidst the ruin they had carved into the world.

Then, his laughter broke through the silence—low at first, a quiet, rasping chuckle that rumbled deep within his chest. But it grew, climbing in pitch and intensity, a jagged, unhinged sound that cracked the fragile atmosphere around them. He laughed like a man standing at the edge of sanity, teetering over the abyss but unwilling to fall completely. It was laughter born not of joy, but of despair so profound it could only mock itself.

“Do what you want,” he finally said, his voice strained with the remnants of his mirth. He didn’t turn to face her. He didn’t need to. His words carried all the weight of his exhaustion, his apathy, his utter detachment from the chaos she threatened. “Gut the lovers I’ll never have. Blind the friends that don’t exist. Murder the enemies that already died.”

The laughter subsided, leaving his voice hollow. “You’ll be fighting ghosts, Marie. Just like I am. Just like I’ve always been.”

He tilted his head slightly, gazing out at the desolation before him, his dark eyes scanning the horizon as though searching for something he knew he would never find. “This world, its people—they mean nothing to me. Their joys, their sorrows, their lives, their deaths… I don’t care. I can’t care. All I’ve ever known is war. All I’ve ever been is a tool for destruction. I was made to burn, to tear down, to obliterate. Attachment? Love? Hatred? They’re all the same in the end. Empty. Worthless. They burn just like everything else.”

But even as he spoke, a flicker of something else stirred in his mind—faces, fleeting but vivid. His family on Plant. The warmth of his father’s hand on his shoulder as they finished sparring. The quiet strength of his mother’s smile as she praised his strength. His younger sister’s laughter, sharp and bright, piercing through the haze of his memories. The images came unbidden, a cruel trick of his fractured mind, and with them, the bitter reminder that they were almost certainly gone, casualties of a war he had fought and survived when they hadn’t.

He was a coward. Such a pathetic, pitiful excuse for the warrior he had been raised to be. The word coward echoed in his mind like the pounding of war drums, relentless and unyielding. He hadn’t fled the war because of noble ideals or some newfound wisdom about the futility of violence. No, he had run because he was terrified—terrified of the horrors he had witnessed, the rivers of blood, the mountains of corpses. Terrified of what the war was turning him into every time he gave in to the rage.

And so he had fled.

His fists clenched, nails biting into his palms as his thoughts hit him like a stone to the chest: They must have joined to atone for my sins. His father, the unyielding patriarch, would have seen his desertion as a stain on their name, a dishonour too heavy to bear. A man who had carved his life in the fires of battle, his father’s pride in their legacy was as solid as the earth beneath his feet—Kail’s abandonment, a blight on that foundation. Would his father have looked at him with nothing but disgust, seeing in him a failure? Or would he have simply closed his eyes, silent and resigned, mourning the son who had abandoned everything they had stood for?

His mother, always gentle but fierce when it came to her family, would have seen it differently. She would have known, deep down, what his choice cost him. But would that make it better or worse? Did she cry? Did she rage against the empty void he had left in his wake? Or did she protect their family's remaining pride with everything she had, clinging to the hope that one day he might come back, might realise his mistake and return to the fold, just as  was expected of their kind?

His sister—his sweet, stubborn sister—she wouldn’t have followed orders, not ever. But she would have fought. Not out of duty, but for him. She had always believed in him, no matter how much he doubted himself. She would have thought, with a kind of fierce faith, that her idiot brother would show up one day, running into battle beside her, laughing at the absurdity of it all, like they used to. That, in the end, no matter how far he ran, he would find his way back.

But as the thought of them—of what they must have felt—pressed upon him, Kail’s heart twisted in a way that had nothing to do with physical pain. Had they thought of him, too? Had they ever thought about him coming back?

It didn’t matter. He hadn’t. He’d run. He’d hidden. He’d failed them all. And now, most likely, they are all dead. Another casualty of his cowardice. Their faces lingered in his mind: his father’s stern eyes, his mother’s comforting smile, his sister’s fierce, mischievous grin. He loved them—loves them—more than anything, but love didn’t bring back the dead. Love didn’t erase the blood on his hands or the void he had left in their lives when he fled.

He could almost hear their voices in the wind. His father’s quiet disappointment. His mother’s forgiving words. His sister’s angry, stubborn demand for him to stop being an idiot and come home. But there was no home to go back to.

Only ashes.

Only ghosts.

There was nothing left.

He had nothing left.

Nothing.

A single tear rolled down his cheek, unnoticed by anyone but himself. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, as if ashamed of its existence, as if it betrayed the very apathy he had just declared.

He was such a disgusting hypocrite.

Without another word, he lifted into the air, his ki flaring faintly around him. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to see her to know she was still there, screaming her defiance into the void he left behind.

As he began to drift higher, his voice carried back to her, soft but clear. “You’ll never find the God you’re searching for. He’s already dead. Just like the rest.”

As he ascended, another tear—smaller, but heavier than the first—traced a line down his face, and for the briefest of moments, he allowed himself to feel it—the pain of his choices, the loss of everything he had once held dear, the consuming feeling of regret.

He let it fall across his face without wiping it away, the lone testament to the man he used to be.

And with a gentle, almost imperceptible drop, it fell, a solitary bead of grief hitting the cracked pavement below.

The last tear he would allow himself.

And then he was gone, a shadow swallowed by the endless sky, leaving only silence and ruin in his wake.