Which Side Am I On?
私はどちら側か
There is a particular danger that no training academy names aloud, because naming it would empty the ranks.
It is the slow, unnoticed moment when the mask you wear stops being a mask and becomes your face.
Anton had lived among the people he was sent to for so long that their griefs had become his own.
He had celebrated their holidays, comforted their widows, and learned to love their bitter, honest bread.
Which of us, he asked the ceiling at night, is the , and which is the man wearing it?
, he had once believed, was a needle that pointed reliably to a single, fixed north.
Now the needle spun freely, drawn by too many magnets, settling on nothing longer than a breath.
He tried to recall the reasons he had first agreed to this work, and found the memory strangely thin.
A remembered without feeling is not a at all, merely a habit dressed in old vocabulary.
He no longer hated the enemy, and a man who cannot hate his enemy cannot fully serve his own side.
Nor could he love his own side, whose faces had grown as foreign to him as the streets he now called home.
He caught himself defending, in silent argument, the very country he had sworn to .
And in the next breath he defended the side that had made him, out of an old he could not kill.
To to two things completely is a way of belonging to neither, and he had crossed that line unseen.
The self he had built for the mission and the self he had brought to it no longer answered to different names.
They had married in the dark somewhere, and the offspring was a stranger he met each morning in the mirror.
Perhaps, he thought, this was what the trade did to everyone who lasted long enough to be useful.
The useful ones were precisely those who had forgotten, or never truly known, whose orders they obeyed.
A perfect servant of two masters is from a man who serves only his own survival.
And survival, he admitted, had quietly become the only flag under which he still marched.
This was not a confession he could make to Reinhardt, nor to the woman, nor even fully to himself.
A man who admits he belongs nowhere becomes, in the eyes of every side, a thing to be disposed of.
So he kept the vertigo private, performing for whichever audience the day happened to bring.
Yet a performance sustained without belief is in a way no physical labour can rival.
Some nights he wanted, with a child's simplicity, only to be one thing entirely, and to rest inside it.
But the door to that simplicity had shut years ago, and he no longer remembered where he had left the key.