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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ExecutiveDax on 2025-12-07 18:48:18+00:00.

Standalone short story. No series, no sequels.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/142939/ace-of-spades

Poitiers, March 17, 2031.

The snow is wrong for spring, but everything has been wrong for months.

I’m one of the civilian volunteers who go in after the shooting stops, tagging bodies so the drones know where to land the refrigerators. The front line rolled through here three days ago and kept rolling. Now the city is quiet except for the wind and the soft click of falling ice off broken neon signs.

I almost stepped over him.

He was sitting upright against the shattered front of a pharmacy, knees drawn up, helmet tilted forward like he’d just sat down for a smoke. Snow had already started to fill the creases of his plate carrier. An ace of spades was laminated to the side of his helmet with clear packing tape gone cloudy from blood and weather. No flag, no unit patch, no name tape. Dog tags gone. Someone had already been through his pockets for batteries and morphine.

Something thick bulged under the Velcro of his chest rig. I knelt, brushed the ice away, and pulled out a battered field notebook, pages swollen and stiff with frozen blood. A photograph was clipped to the inside cover: a dark-haired woman laughing on a pier somewhere sunny, holding a little boy who was reaching for the camera. On the back, in faded ink: If lost, please return to Elena, New Tampa.

I opened the journal. The handwriting was small, hurried, but still legible. I read it there in the snow, next to a man who would never finish whatever he started writing.

Entry 1 – 09 Feb 2031, 0450 hrs

We’re stacked in the assault ramp of an LCAC that smells like puke and burning plastic. Fog so thick the ramp could drop us into the Atlantic and we’d never know. Someone’s playing old Kendrick on a cracked phone speaker. The skipper screams “One minute!” and fifty rifles clack off safe at once.

I always wanted to see France. Not like this.

Entry 2 – 10 Feb, Aid Station Gold

Three rounds through the meat of my left thigh. Hurts like hell but the doc says clean, no artery. I’ll walk tomorrow.

Kid in the next cot took graphene flechettes to the skull. He’s seventeen, maybe eighteen, still wearing his high-school ring. Keeps asking for his mother in Mandarin. Nobody here speaks it.

I am so fucking lucky.

Entry 3 – 21 Feb, somewhere south of Caen

They told us 72 hours to Paris. Week seven and we’re still trading villages for body bags. Brass is watching the whole thing in neural-feed from a resort in Lisbon while we haven’t had a hot meal since the landing.

My toes are black. I can’t feel them anymore. I think about the kid with no legs back on Gold and I shut up and keep marching.

Entry 4 – 16 Mar, 2340 hrs

Tomorrow we go into Poitiers proper. Orders are to clear the administrative district (whatever that even means when half the government fled to Brazil last year).

Elena, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. I taped your picture where I can see it when I close my eyes. Tell Mateo his dad tried to make the world make sense again. I don’t think it worked.

I love you both more than winning.

Entry 5 – 17 Mar, 0612 hrs

Fog’s back. Same exact fog as the beach. Can’t see ten meters. Drones are blind, artillery’s walking blind, everything’s blind.

We’re not pixels.

It hurts.

Tell them it h—

The rest of the page is charred. The fire that cooked him must have started in his pouch and burned itself out against the snow.

I sat there for a long time. Long enough for the wind to pile fresh snow on both of us.

When I finally stood, I slid the journal back inside his rig, pressed the Velcro closed, and zipped his jacket over it so the pages would stay dry a little longer. I brushed the snow from his shoulders the way you’d brush it off a friend who fell asleep on the porch.

On the very last page, in pencil almost too faint to read, he had written a name I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I whispered it once, out loud, so someone in this city would know it before the refrigerators came.

“Rest easy, Corporal Ramírez.” I left the ace of spades where it was. Some things should stay with their owners.

Poitiers belongs to the dead now.

The rest of us are just passing through.

If it hits you, a rating on Royal Road helps a ton.

Thanks for reading.