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[sub][color=Silver][i]The Siege of Amone, September 27th - [b]Garment's Return[/b][/i][/color][/sub]

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[color=Silver]	Jean spent the time brooding, thinking away at the unforgiving torment of their previous incursion. Brutalised by the reality that someone he'd grown to trust and like over the month was now subjected to death, he'd turned to the tent's crude bedding once more, sat upon its edge and staring blankly at pieces of paper he held in front of him. Upon it laid something he held, still to that day. Of course, it was shrivelled, falling apart mostly from the years of torturous aggression the paper had taken. Most of its words were smudged and its cursive font blistered into near disintegration. And yet whilst its pages were ruined, stashed away in Jean's personal logistics footlocker that he had been provided as an NCO, the first two words still remained as they were. Those first two opening words were enough to keep the letter as it was, giving it the life and meaning that it held in Jean's heart. A finger stroked the embroiled swirls of dried ink. In that instance, he absorbed the emotions that he'd once tried to suppress the day he arrived on the frontline: familial melancholy. Marked up and toiled with sadness, Jean wiped away the last tear from his eye that day, hoping to return to the land of emotionless turmoil. He'd witnessed someone close die. Jean had seen Thomas' leg separate from his body, before being emptied and drained of all blood from the wound. Singed into his mind like a blacksmith's implant, the visionary torture toyed with the deepest emotional distress Jean suffered from. He hated it all. Life was seemingly being stripped down to its bone. He'd heard brief news that his squadmates were still alive and had luckily been grazed by the excruciating blast of the shell's inferno. Even now, an hour or so after the shell had been dropped, the everlasting sounds of distant soldiers yelling medical orders or transporting the dead out of sight continued to ruin the midday's mood. Morale was beginning to topple once more. The devastation was unearthly. Hell had once again spread its overbearing wings over the land it strove to infect. Jean couldn't help but feel the immense emotion that spread throughout the Federation armed forces. Amone had become a confined, walled off battleground that yielded a form of combat unlike any other. Trenches were never dug and battles were fought on motion and positioning, not on who had the deepest hole dug. Once he thought of how the war had shifted in its tone upon entering Amone, Jean looked back down towards the piece of paper he held in his hands. Silently, he whispered the first two words once more.

	[b]Dear Jean[/b]. That's all he could read. Most of the letter was known off by heart, but everything else was almost entirely wiped, crumbled or washed away from the years of wear and tear. Behind it, the very last [url=https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/498628320745750528/534147729413111818/e6f0f9e8ca34a518dfbc265994496a63.png]photo[/url] Jean knew of her remained held together by a rusty paperclip. Olivia's crumbling existence was forgotten by all except Jean. He held those two beginning words to heart, knowing that someday that could be the only documentation about her as a soldier, and as a sister. Instead, Jean closed the letter, staring only at the photo now. Her uniform was pristine, neatly pressed and up to the standards of past wars. Back then, the standards for the army themselves were about conduct rather than fighting ability. Helmets hadn't been introduced and even the trenches were yet to be established when that singular photo was taken. Who took it was beyond Jean's sense of knowledge, but he knew that either of them were likely dead in the waters of the Maren only the following year. Spluttered and cut by the bullets of her adversaries, she was gone. Jean was left without a family, nor the closest friend he ever had. And now? He'd felt like it was all coming back to him. Thomas' death only made him ever the more concerned about how Olivia was murdered and whether it was painful. She deserved the best and could have received the worst. In times like those, Jean became desensitised to the reality of the world around him. No more could he imagine these as but nightmares; instead he saw them as a reality he lived in.

	Jean's paranoia grew as he put the photo away, leaving him in the empty tent alone once more. Even his thoughts wandered away, letting him stare at the floor with the need to relax. Jean's stress had grown exponentially. He felt for his squadmates, for Franz, Michael, Freya, Reyna and even Vicky to a very small extent. Today was a day someone was lost. Not everyone was close to him, in fact few were. He hoped that those who weren't lucky enough to know Thomas well were at least at ease with the situation. Shouts of rallied martyrdom came from a nearby Luke before disappearing into the distance, aggravating Jean more to the point where he stood up and paced back and forth all across the tent. For fifteen minutes, he looked back to his rifle and disassembled it, before cleaning a component or two and reassembling it. Tomorrow was going to be another day of excruciating pain, violence and death. Thousands were going to be pitted against one another in the streets of Amone until only the last man stood tall. Just like at Hill 58, the charge itself was not going to be sparred of the never-ending suffering.

	And as he sat down, sighing once more, something took him off guard. A slow shift in the tent's opening flaps suddenly revealed an approaching figure. Jean's eyes didn't meet them at first, refusing to move out of the shameful presentation of what he'd become. The disturbed eyes and the thousand yard stare pointed straight into the ground made him ashamed of what he may have looked like, suspecting the new acquaintance was just another officer looking for able bodies to use. It was when the voice rang out that his expectations were subverted into a spiralling confusion of emotional intrigue.

	His name? The female voice sounded so...familiar? Jean's eyes shifted in their sockets and rolled towards the angelic concern of a friend. And as his mind was previously left in the darkest corners of humanity's dismissal, Jean saw [i]her[/i]. A walking beauty, stood with a concerned and hesitant interest in his unworthy position, reached out and held her hand hanging in the air. Motioning his gaze towards her, he spent a second to study everything about her, embracing the heavenly glow of her aura once more. Around her neck laid a far familiar scarf circumnavigated her throat. It was a face he'd been wanting to see for a long time, a very long time, and now she stood before him, reuniting with only a distraught Francian to greet her. As he stared, the pain in his eyes almost flushed out immediately as an oddly fractured smile began to plaster itself upon his face. He stood up slowly, hesitant and trembling at the knees.[/color]

[color=Aqua][b]"Kalisa?"[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Even after she spoke his name, all he could do at first was respond by confirming her own. Without a second to spare, he took the hand she'd held out and drew it closer to himself, embracing her with a sudden and unprecedented hug. The embrace was heart-warming. The feeling and sensation of a familiar beauty colliding with his broken body was truly an invigorating sensory overload. Softly having taken her hand to draw her near, he felt almost alive for once, having touched the skin of a figure who was not yet dying. He wasn't aware of the move he made at first, simply going by the instincts of her appearance, and more or less to prove she wasn't yet another hallucination.[/color] [color=Aqua][b]"O...oh...lord, Kalisa! Where have you been!?"[/b][/color]

[color=Silver]	For once, he started to smile more, moving out of the hug but keeping his hands gently plastered onto her shoulders. Jean's face moved only a few feet away from her own gaze, revealing his blended emotional distress and outburst of happiness to see her once more. The Darcsens had been reunited. Around her neck circled the scarf that he had given to her a long time ago, still in the same position as before. Gently, he moved his fingers to the familial symbolism to the Robin-Charpentier Darcsen insignia, reuniting with the silky softness of its dainty texture. Jean's cheeks flushed as he realised she'd kept it the entire time, as if out of its comfort. Or perhaps...no, she couldn't have kept it for sentimental values.[/color]

[color=Aqua][b]"My...my scarf? You...still have it, Kalisa?"[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Jean wiped a forming tear from his eye, clearly overtaken with a rush of emotions. The balance of his distress for Thomas and appraisal of Kalisa was toying with his very head, forging a unforgiving flourish of happiness. Once again, he felt that strangely similar attraction that he'd felt those days before when they were still working alongside one another.[/color] [color=Aqua][b]"It's...I've missed this, and yet it brings the beauty out of yo-"[/b][/color]

[color=Silver]	Jean's consciousness seemingly snapped back into reality as he quickly drew back onto his bed, moving away nervously and silencing himself with an embarrassed flush of pink in his cheeks. It had been far too long since Jean had complimented or really flirted with one of the three girl's that he'd found himself deeply affectionate towards. Quietly, he whispered a few apologies to himself, at least loud enough for her to hear, out of the sheer embarrassment of his overreaction.[/color]

[color=Aqua][b]"U-uhh...sorry, Kal', I mean...Kalisa! Sorry, it's...I'm just happy...extremely happy to see you're still alive...and well, I hope. You...look amazing...uhh...amazingly well, yes!"[/b][/color] [color=Silver]Jean sighed, tossing himself back onto the unfolded camping bed that he'd been assigned within the tent. Exasperated by the emotional temptation, he tried to compose himself once more.[/color] [color=Aqua][b]"I'm sorry, it's...been a really rough day. I went out on a Scouting Mission and...well Squad 1 lost Corporal Thomas...I'm...still a bit in shock, I won't lie."[/b][/color]

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