A fight had already broken out, and he was thankful that he was on the outskirts of it. Caleb had been an easy target at the beginning - he was small, fragile, and his long hair made him a target of pullings and other assorted acts of violence. He had long gotten used to it, to the hair tugs and the violence. They had tried to make him submit to their demands - other prisoners. But the thing that they had forgotten was that Arthur Prince had smiled and whistled the national anthem when he blew his friends' heads off. It wasn't that he was a pyschopath. It made sense, at the time - they had tried to convince Arthur to turn around - to leave the Middle East and return home to his sister and his father. So he had to pull the trigger. His squad was twelve men, and he was the NCO. It was important that he lead them, and sometimes, that meant killing them. In here, NCO meant nothing. It was a mindless string of letters - not even an acronym that was pronounceable. In here, all that NCO meant was that when it came to killing, Caleb had more experience than most of these SSRI muddled nobodies. They all weren't anybody, now. The pressure to reveal his name might have been great, but what would she have done if she had known? Kill him?
The girl seemed to suggest so - if he touched her, she would kill him. A different girl than the one who wanted to know his name. It seemed as if despite his best intentions, he had become a target of interest - and a little girl with mismatched eyes saw him. Blue and Green. One and the other. Caleb's own were a swirling of the two hues, as dark and unfathomable as the turbulent sea. He found himself thankful that they could not see the bodies on his beaches, for his eyelids were overwhelmed with a hecatomb of mutilated bodies. Their bones made up the whites of his eyes, and their rotting flesh was the pink of the sclera. His eyes hadn't always been that colour. A woman, once, had told him that his eyes were beautiful. And he had hated her for that, but not as much as he hated himself in this solitary instant, with this girl telling him, with her blue and green eyes, unable to see Caleb's green-blue ones, that the woman with the rough words would murder him. But only if he touched her. Caleb had no intention to touch her. He didn't want to hurt her, and he didn't want her to feel the rotten tips of his fingertips. He may never felt hunger, not now, not anymore, but boredom was a persistent problem. In these periods of boredom, what he did was chew away at his fingertips until the numbness of his body finally gave out. Although the skin cells regenerated, cancerously, he had bit away at his fingertips so many times that his nails had gone black at the tips.
He felt hot breath in his face - she was trying to brush back his hair from his face, so that she could see Caleb's features. He cringed, and shirked away from the hot exhale of breath. It was so warm, and he was so cold. He could not remember the last time that he had felt truly warm - he could not remember. Maybe it was when his boots first hit dirt in Afghanistan, or maybe it was before. Maybe it was that warm day back in the summer of '89, when his sister handed him a firecracker, and his father berated him for committing arson. It was hard to remember warmth - touch was even more remote. He was not going to touch her, even though he had long forgotten what it was to touch another human being, to feel another person under his fingertips, but he doubted that he would have been able to feel her anyway. His fingertips were too calloused, and the nerves were too dead. He lurched away from her, away and upward. He stood up. When slouching, he was only a little bit more than five-feet tall, and in order to keep his hair infront of his face, he could not stand up to his full, admittedly pathetic height. Caleb clutched the blanket around his shoulders. He was drowning in the small sheet of fabric. Skinny - you could see all of his bones. You see his skull. He was some hollow and dead thing.
Caleb had to give her some sort of answer, didn't he? He adjusted the blanket around his shoulders, and bowed his head to her. His blue eyes gleamed beneath heavy brows. In the dark light, maybe they would glow like darkvision goggles, and turn the whole world around him green. But they wouldn't. He had gone three years without sight, without food, and without drink. Three years without touch, three years without anybody really knowing who he was. He was Caleb Norwill. He was Arthur Prince. And in the file that he knew they had locked away - they knew about him. They knew about Arthur. But the one thing, the one piece of him that they did not have was his memories. They could not find that. Even when they called him Caleb Norwill, and showed him a picture of a man that he may have once been - in a dream - they could not take away Caroline and his father, sitting in a lawn chair and sipping lemonade while Vietnam played violently in the back of his skull. But a name. He needed a name. He had to give her something to call him. Maybe he could make a friend.
Arthur smiled faintly, the sides of his mouth twitching. The smile was half-concealed in the shadow of lank hair. He began to move, moving towards the huddled masses, the line where he would be assigned a number, and his identity would disappear, lost in a paper trail that had become too winding and treacherous for even the most seasoned of travelers. "I was Caleb. Once," Arthur said, softly. And when he spoke, his voice had no smile in it. It had sorrow. It had pain. And more than anything, it had memories.
