This is my submission for Day 1 of Flash Fiction February.
You can find the submissions library here.
I leaned into a metaphorical interpretation of the first prompt. You can find context in the author’s notes, but for now, please proceed to the negotiating table and exercise restraint.
These negotiations didn’t have to be in person. We carried the same rank, but our badges opened different doors. Neither of us was authorized to make any deals, but we both kept finding reasons to be in the same room. I admired her mind; she was attracted to the playfulness hidden behind my mask.
The Central Authority kept us on opposite sides of the compound, with peacekeepers patrolling the hallways. I didn’t see her outside that negotiation room, but in there I noticed her wit, the quirk of her lip, and the way her laugh sounded like music.
The battlefield was far away: virtual, never-ending, and impossibly unnecessary. Still, we kept our shields up. After all, the Central Authority could still get us here too.
In that room, we started a second war: a war with ourselves, expressed in the things we didn’t say, the glances that lingered half a second too long, the way silence filled the space where honesty wanted to be. We were excellent at restraint, forged over years of dehumanization, lauded and reinforced as a core competency.
Four years have passed. The Central Authority didn’t see my value and redeployed me on the other side of the battlefield under a different flag. Governments changed, the conflict changed, and a peace dawned, but the inner war still raged.
No one died, nothing exploded, and history will not remember us… But sometimes, when I see an empty meeting room, I think about how easy it would have been to close the door and stop pretending the rules mattered more than we did.
Author’s notes
I hope this doesn’t disqualify me, but the story is less about war itself and more about systems of control: systems that don’t just keep people in conflict, but at war with their own emotions.
Many of our institutions teach us to self-police. “Clearance,” “authorization,” “peacekeepers,” and “redeployment” are the language of control, whether the institution is a government or a company. In both, the rules can make perfect sense for the system while remaining deeply dehumanizing in practice.
The real conflict here isn’t a distant battlefield. It’s the private war of restraint: two peers can want each other, can be safe together, and still choose silence because they’ve been trained to prioritize procedure over honesty.
This story isn’t about nuclear fear or heroism. It’s about a quieter dread: denying yourself the dangerous, electric euphoria of what might have been.
Image credit: “Love padlocks on the Butchers' Bridge in Ljubljana,” Slovenia by Petar Milošević. Found on Wikimedia Commons, no alterations made.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Link to license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
This is lovely and war is war, internal, battlefields, cooperate boardrooms, or systems of control. I loved your take on the prompt.✨🦋
Good take on this.