Fic: Target practice
May. 26th, 2016 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rusakkoSigrun is looking for her right-hand warrior.
They’ve stopped to make camp earlier than usual today – only a little after noon – because Tuuri wants to investigate a worrying rattle coming from somewhere under the hood of the tank. Right now, she’s up to her elbows in grease and seems to have disassembled half of the tank’s engine. Sigrun sincerely hopes that the little mechanic knows what she’s doing.
Meanwhile, Mikkel has taken the opportunity to set up a huge laundry washing operation with the red-headed shepherd boy. They’ve turned the small clearing behind the tank into a soggy swamp of slush and mud and are currently rigging up an impressive network of washing lines between some nearby trees.
Sigrun assumes that Lalli is sleeping somewhere in the tank. And wherever Lalli is, Emil is likely to be close by.
She is right. Peeking into their small sleeping space, she sees Emil sitting on his bunk, half-heartedly flipping through the pages of one of the few books they’ve managed to salvage. Sprawled next to him, his head not quite in Emil’s lap, Lalli is munching on a cookie, eyes almost closed. Emil is absent-mindedly running his fingers through the scout’s hair. The boys seem to have resolved whatever little disagreement they had a few days ago. Based on the disgustingly smug expression on Lalli’s narrow face and Emil’s half embarrassed, half dreamy air, Sigrun has a sneaky suspicion that the making up may have involved making out.
Good for them. However, Sigrun has no qualms about interrupting the happy moment. There are still a couple of hours of daylight left, and she intends to use them for something long overdue.
Sigrun loudly clears her throat.
“Get up, pretty boy! You can cuddle with Lalli later, but I’m not letting you waste the whole day looking at a stupid book. Grab your stuff, we’re going out.”
Emil leaps up from the bed as if it had suddenly turned red-hot, blushing furiously. Lalli lets out a dissatisfied hiss.
Sigrun ignores the scout’s glare. “Meet me outside in five minutes, Emil. Bring your gun and plenty of ammunition.”
Sigrun has set her sights on a small hill that looks to be about half an hour’s walk from their camp – a very small hill, since Denmark is the most ridiculously flat country she has ever seen. No majestic mountains here, and no deep fjords. She misses them, sometimes. The landscape they’ve been driving through for the past few days has offered next to no variation. Just an endless progression of grey, leafless trees and damp snow covering what Mikkel says used to be farmland ninety years ago. It has nearly bored her out of her mind.
However, the hill will hopefully be high enough to give them an overview of the surrounding area, and it also seems to be almost treeless, which suits the purpose of this little excursion. And, most importantly, it’s at a safe distance from the tank in case the noise they’re going to make attracts trolls or beasts.
“Uh, so what are we going to do, exactly?” Emil asks, panting slightly as he tries to keep up with Sigrun’s long strides. “Make sure the area’s safe?”
“Nah, that’s the scout’s job,” Sigrun replies. “We’re going to do some target practice, because frankly, you really need it. The next time we run into a troll, I want you to be able to shoot it dead instead of just setting it on fire and making it go crazy. Besides, I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I didn’t have to worry about you accidentally hitting me or Lalli because you can’t aim.”
She’s more than half expecting Emil to protest at this brutal but unfortunately quite honest assessment of his skills. To her surprise, he doesn’t, merely mumbling a subdued “okay”. Strange. Emil is usually not shy to complain if someone threatens his all too well-fed ego.
Emil stays quiet for the rest of their walk up to the hilltop. Glancing at him, Sigrun notes that his expression is oddly grim. Did he take offense at her words? Oh well, hopefully it’ll motivate him to push himself. She knows from experience that wanting to impress your superiors can help young soldiers get that extra effort in. Though on occasion, it can also lead to acts of sheer stupidity.
The view from the hilltop offers little of interest. Just more overgrown farmland, spotted with ruins of old-world buildings and, in the distance, a couple of small frozen-over lakes. There are no signs of troll or beast activity in their immediate surroundings, either. Good. While she’s never averse to a little bit of fighting, Sigrun would prefer not to lead anything back to the camp while the tank is temporarily out of commission.
“We’ll start with something easy,” she tells Emil, cutting off a few reasonably straight branches from a tree with her knife. “Help me set these up for targets, will you? Just stick a snowball at the tip of each stick and we’ll try to hit those.”
Emil wordlessly obeys. Sigrun is starting to find his silence a little unnerving. It’s a stark contrast to his usual babbling.
“So what’s Swedish cleanser training like?” she asks as they work. “Fun, boring, hard, easy?” Strangely inconsistent, at least, she’d like to add. The more she’s seen of Emil’s fighting, the more puzzled she’s become. He clearly knows what he’s doing with his flamethrower and his explosives, but he’s atrocious with a rifle. And how can it be possible that a cleanser who’s been with the army for two years has so little experience of trolls?
“It was okay,” Emil says after a fraction of a pause, not turning to look at Sigrun. “A lot of physical training.”
His tone is carefully neutral, his expression blank. Sigrun is becoming more and more confused about his sudden reticence.
"Make any friends?” she asks lightly, hoping that this will get a longer answer.
She immediately senses that she’s said something wrong. Emil has his back to her, but she can see how his entire body stiffens and his hands still from their work.
“No,” he says quietly. “Not really.”
The air around Emil is thick with unsaid words. Sigrun has heard him brag about the Swedish cleansers to Tuuri before – claiming they’re the most technologically advanced, well‑organized, highly respected soldiers in the Known World and other such nonsense – but there’s none of that now. Thinking back, she recalls feeling that there was something slightly forced about his bragging. As if he was trying to convince himself as much as the little Finnish skald. And, she thinks, watching Emil push the last stick into the snow with slightly unsteady hands, he’s never said a word about his former captain or colleagues.
Come to think of it, he’s never mentioned any friends at all.
Emil desperately hopes that Sigrun can’t see the tension gripping his body as he finishes setting up the last target. He’s been on edge ever since she told him they were going to do target practice, but it’s her casual question about his training that’s really unnerved him. He thought he’d been doing pretty well up until now, but of course it was only going to be a matter of time before she noticed what a failure he is. He’s messed up again. Even though he’s been trying so hard and hoping so badly that, this time, things would be different.
But then, that was what he hoped when he originally joined the cleansers, too. He was attracted by the promise of adventure as well, of course, and the chance to show the teachers who had ridiculed the gaps in his knowledge that he could become rich and famous despite not speaking Icelandic or knowing how to solve quadratic equations. In his heart, though, what he really wanted was to make friends. To feel that he belonged.
He’d never really had a lot of friends. Being tutored at home had isolated him from other children, and the other students at the public school he’d ended up at after the disastrous loss of the family fortune hadn’t been very interested in befriending him. Particularly not after he’d boasted about his academic prowess only to fail the very first test they were given. He’d been largely ignored by everyone after that.
He’d heard someone say that the people you worked with in the military would be your friends for life. The photograph on the recruitment poster had stuck in his mind – grinning men and women with their arms around each other’s shoulders, a perfect picture of camaraderie.
The reality, it turned out, was different.
On their first day in the military, the new cleanser recruits were subjected to a series of tests to determine whether they were ready for the harsh demands of military life. Those who passed would begin the six-month weapons and explosives training required before they were sent into the field. Those who failed must first go through three months of intense physical training to put them in shape. Looking around him at the other recruits, several of whom barely seemed to be above the minimum age of thirteen, Emil thought that while he maybe wasn’t in the greatest possible physical condition, he wouldn’t have any trouble beating most of them. Some of them were more than a head shorter than he.
Later that day, watching a scrawny little farm girl do pull-up after pull-up while his own arms hurt from just hanging from the bar, Emil began to realize that he might have been wrong.
“I bet that chubby guy won’t last for more than a week,” he heard someone say. There was a ripple of laughter as Emil dropped down, his cheeks burning.
He didn’t pass the test.
The 13- and 14-year-olds he ended up grouped with for physical training were wary of him at first, but they soon discovered that they could ridicule him without fear of repercussions as long as they didn’t make it too obvious in front of their instructors. Emil had never needed to stick up for himself before, and he found that he wasn’t much good at it. He couldn’t come up with quick-witted replies to the other recruits’ snide comments, and he felt that reacting with other weapons than words would have been beneath him. This left him an easy target. Not that Emil would have wanted to be friends with a bunch of immature little kids, anyway, but the taunts still stung.
Especially because many of them were accurate. He was fat, he was slow, and he was clumsy. The uniform coat that made most of his fellow recruits look like children dressing up in their parents’ clothes was uncomfortably tight around his waist. On the gruelling early-morning runs that started each new day, he was more often than not the last one to stumble back to the barracks, coughing and panting and barely managing not to throw up. When the first snow fell at the beginning of the second month of training, he broke his ski poles (and almost his neck, too) crashing into a tree after losing control of his skis.
The other aspects of army life didn’t agree with him either. The food was awful, the showers were cold and the mattress on his narrow bed was thin and uncomfortable. The wake-up call always came at some ungodly hour of the early morning, and the chores they were given in addition to their strength and endurance training ensured that he never got to bed as soon as he would have liked to. Besides, he constantly seemed to be on latrine cleaning duty.
Only the memory of the row he’d had with his parents about joining the military kept him from handing in his resignation and taking the train back home to Östersund. They’d been furious that he wanted to abandon his academic career. His father had said he wasn’t cut out for the military, his mother had told him he was making the biggest mistake of his life. He wasn’t going to prove them right by giving up.
Emil also held on to the hope that things would get better once he advanced to the actual cleanser training. At least he’d be in decent shape. As the end of the first three months approached, he was still the slowest runner in his group, but at least he could keep up with the others when doing push-ups and stomach crunches. He’d also lost a lot of his chubbiness, and if he squinted a bit in the mirror, he could almost swear that there was some muscle beginning to show here and there.
Once again, he was wrong. It didn’t get better. It got worse.
Being grouped with the younger kids, he’d only had to endure giggles and name-calling. His advantage in size had deterred them from attempts at physical bullying. Now, with several other recruits his own age and a couple who were even older, he had no such protection.
They never beat him up – they were clever enough to realize that leaving him battered and bruised would be bound to have consequences. Instead, there were sudden shoves from behind on the stairs and legs stuck out to trip him while he was carrying his tray in the mess-hall. In the mornings, his boots were never where he’d left them the previous night, and one evening he discovered that someone had dumped a bucket of water (he fervently hoped that it was just water) in his bed.
The training itself didn’t go smoothly, either. Although Emil soon discovered that he had a natural talent for setting things on fire, he was less talented at keeping the fire under control. He also had an unfortunate tendency to miscalculate the amount of charges needed to blow up a building, resulting in some spectacular but rather dangerous explosions and a lot of yelling from his instructors.
It was target practice, however, that became his true nemesis. He’d looked forward to it in advance, even dared to hope that this might be the one thing he’d be genuinely good at. After all, shooting didn’t require strength or speed, and a rifle was less unpredictable than a raging fire.
It never became completely clear to Emil how the accident happened. They were on their way the shooting range. The lieutenant in charge of their weapons training had gone over the safety instructions one last time. Emil was carrying his rifle exactly as he’d been taught, with the muzzle carefully pointed down and away from the other recruits around him, and the safety was on. He was absolutely sure it was on.
It still didn’t stop the rifle from going off when he stumbled – Did someone trip him on purpose? He never dared to suggest it during the investigation that followed, although he could’ve sworn his foot snagged on something more substantial than just a loose stone – and crashed headlong into the dirt, the rifle hitting the ground underneath him. He was told later that it was a miracle that there were no life-threatening injuries. If the bullet had hit the lieutenant ten centimetres to the right, she could have died. As it was, she got off with a severely injured upper arm.
In the end, what saved Emil from being dismissed from the cleansers was that the new recruits were always given the oldest and most battered weapons to practice with. It was determined that his rifle had malfunctioned, and the accident could therefore not be deemed to be his fault. Still, their new shooting instructor seemed to regard him as a dangerous idiot and watched him like a hawk whenever they were at the shooting range. The other recruits, meanwhile, didn’t bother to hide their disappointment that he hadn’t been sent packing, and would yell “Who are you going to shoot next?” at him whenever their instructors were out of hearing range.
If his aim was anything to go by, however, Emil would never manage to shoot anyone or anything intentionally. Even thinking about the shooting range made him feel sick. During target practice, with the instructor coldly observing his every move, his hands were usually so unsteady that it was a miracle if he ever got close to hitting the targets.
At the end of the six-month cleanser training, Emil fully expected to be told that he hadn’t passed and that he’d have to return home in shame. He was able to throw a grenade further than anyone else in his training class, he’d learned how to not burn his eyebrows off every time he used a flamethrower, and he could march for thirty kilometres carrying his full equipment almost without complaining. But he still couldn’t aim to save his life.
Therefore, he could only gape at the captain who informed him that he’d be posted to the military settlement in Malung, at the outskirts of the cleansed area around Mora.
“Do you have a problem with this, Västerström?” the captain snapped.
“No,” Emil managed to get out. “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
And at first, it did indeed seem as if things were finally going his way again. The other cleansers in his unit weren’t exactly friendly, but they didn’t push him around or call him names, either. After his experiences in cleanser training, Emil was prepared to count this as a success. It didn’t really matter that he somehow never quite managed to join in on their conversations around the campfire in the evenings. Or that their captain surreptitiously seemed to make sure that Emil was always given the least demanding, least dangerous jobs.
Someone needs to stay behind and guard the camp. The horses need to be tended to. There’s no shame in it, he would tell himself, ignoring the constricted feeling in his throat as he watched the smoke rising from the forest that his team-mates were burning down a kilometre or two away. No need to ask the captain why he’d been left on guard duty every day that week, and the week before as well.
They didn’t mean for Emil to hear the conversation. The others in his tent were fast asleep, exhausted after a long day spent clearing out the remains of a small village. Emil, on the other hand, had spent most of the day standing around and pretending to guard the camp from trolls that even he realized were very unlikely to appear. He wasn’t tired, and the snoring was keeping him awake. That was why he couldn’t avoid overhearing far too many of the night guards’ soft-spoken words.
“– was only allowed to pass because the high-ups want every man and woman who somehow scrapes through the training to go into the field – they’ve promised the Finns more help next summer and there’s the Sveavägen project, too.”
“But why’d they have to put him here?”
“The captain pissed off Major Eriksson a few months ago, he got saddled with Västerström as revenge…”
That was the moment Emil finally decided to give up. He was never going to make it as a cleanser. He’d thought he could finally get to prove himself, show everyone that he was brave, smart, good for something. Instead, everyone thought he was useless. A liability. He’d never get a chance to show them that they were wrong. They were returning to the base the next day. He would walk up to the major’s office and resign then.
He probably would have gone through with it, too, if he hadn’t found the letter from Uncle Torbjörn waiting for him. Instead, he ended up applying for leave to join a mission into the Silent world.
This was his last chance to prove what he was worth. A new start, with people who didn’t know about his failures in training. And, if the mission went well, fame, money, respect.
He just needed to make a good first impression.
Sigrun can see that Emil won’t hit the targets even before he lifts his rifle. His movements are tense and jerky, his breathing too fast. The first shot misses. So do the second, the third and the fourth. Each miss makes Emil more flustered. Sigrun bites back the impulse to snap that he should focus. Emil’s brow is furrowed in concentration and his lips are pressed into a thin white line. This is not the moment for snarky comments or ridicule. The kid is genuinely upset about something, though Sigrun can only guess at what. Even his aim isn’t normally this bad. His hands are unsteady as he tries to load the next magazine into the rifle.
It’s completely useless to continue if she can’t get Emil to calm down. Right now, they’re just wasting ammunition and running the risk of attracting trolls. Besides, Sigrun has a distinct feeling that she needs to get to the bottom of whatever has made Emil so upset. It’s going to come back and bite her if she doesn’t. A captain has to know the strengths and weaknesses of her soldiers.
Emil is still fumbling with his rifle, his back turned towards Sigrun. She reaches out and places her hand on his shoulder. “Hey. Breathe. Take your time, there’s no hurry.”
Except that the sun is going to set in an hour’s time, but Emil doesn’t need to hear that right now.
The tension in Emil’s shoulder seems to ease up a fraction. The magazine clicks into place.
“Good. And now, before we continue, you’re going to tell me why talking about cleanser training turned my right-hand warrior into a ham-handed civilian.”
It’s just a shot in the dark, but it’s obvious that she’s hit the mark. Emil makes a choked noise, and for a moment Sigrun thinks he’s going to cry, but he manages to keep his voice almost steady as he mutters: “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But you’re going to, anyway”, Sigrun informs him firmly. “I need to know what I’m working with if I’m going to try and teach you stuff. And anyway, I’m your captain – I can put you on the mutinist list if you don’t start talking.”
He does talk, in the end. If you can call reluctant mumbles and one-word answers talking, that is. It’s almost as bad as trying to communicate with the scout. Emil won’t even look at her directly. However, Sigrun manages to squeeze out enough information to be able to work the missing pieces out herself.
The picture that forms makes her angry, both on a personal and a professional level. On a personal level because she likes Emil despite all his incompetence. He’s self-centred and a bit of a snob, yes, and has an unfortunate tendency to put his foot in his mouth. But underneath that there’s a kind and courageous kid with the potential to become a perfectly decent soldier. He doesn’t deserve to have been treated like this. Nobody does.
On a professional level, Sigrun is angry because even though Emil doesn’t say it outright, it’s clear that the officers in charge of the cleanser training must have been aware of the bullying – and allowed it to go on. This disgusts her. Giants and trolls are bad enough on their own. You don’t need your troops attacking each other as well. Good morale is important, and letting soldiers pick on one another is one of the best ways to destroy it.
Sigrun doesn’t say any of this to Emil. Letting herself get emotional isn’t going to help him. Anyway, she’s no head-doctor. If Emil needs fancy words and deep insights, Mikkel is the one for that. Sigrun is going to focus on the practical side of things.
“Okay, so your previous training’s been complete crap. We’re going to fix that,” she tells her young subordinate. “I’m not just the most best troll hunter in Norway, I’m also the most best teacher.”
Emil doesn’t respond.
“Do you doubt that?” Sigrun asks him, a bit more sharply.
“No.” Emil’s voice is a bit hoarse, but it’s steadier than before, and he finally looks at her.
“Good. Now we’re going to continue with the target practice, and you’re going to hit at least half of those snowballs before the sun goes down.”
He does, and although his aim is still atrocious, he’s at least able to concentrate on the instructions Sigrun is giving him. She makes sure to praise him for the improvement as they begin their walk back to the camp. Emil probably knows just as well as Sigrun that there’s not much reason for praise, but it still makes him hold his head up a little straighter. Poor kid, so eager to please. If those stupid Swedish cleansers had given him a little bit of patience and reassurance, he wouldn’t be crippled by his insecurities like he is now.
I’ll show them, Sigrun thinks. Hear me, gods: I swear to you that by the end of the winter, this boy is going to be the greatest warrior Sweden has ever seen. It’s a reckless promise, but the gods favour the bold. And in any case, you surely don’t need to be that good to be the best warrior in Sweden. Norway would be a different story.
She glances at Emil, who is trudging through the snow by her side. The setting sun gives his golden hair a tint of red. A strong colour, the colour of blood and fire. Sigrun decides that it’s a good omen.
We’ll make a real warrior of you yet, little Viking. Just you wait and see.
