☆ If you hadn't been a clone and had a choice of your vocation/what you did with your life, what would you have chosen to do?
☆, a question, and Ordo’s absolute honesty
For someone who has devoted his entire life to giving that choice to his brothers, it has never actually occurred to Ordo to ask that question of himself. Somehow, he’s never thought about it. Why? That answer does not come easily either.
If he was allowed the choice to be something other than a soldier–
For a moment, his answer startles him. (Surprise is a rarity in him. It is usually the signal of something unsettling.)
“I don’t know anything else but how to be a soldier.” It’s in the way he holds himself so straight-backed and upright. It’s in the way he moves to disguise tracks. It’s in the way he scans a room for threats. Unconsciously. He is a fighter, born and bred, by nature and by nurture. “I wasn’t allowed to be anything else, you’re right.”
“But, even now, I can’t imagine doing anything else.” Perhaps, it’s asking too much of him, asking him to actually face how little he knows of life outside the GAR even after all his effort to change that. It was to feel woefully ignorant, and that always troubled him. “Even if things had been different, nothing else seems to fit right.”
Ordo doesn’t know anything about peace.He cannot be anything other than a man at war.