okay: don't read "Freedom" and write funerals at the same time

I've been doing journals for the past two days, all of it on Kipling's poetry, and some of my entries have been inspired-by ficlets. All Spaceforce, of course.

And the last one is prompted by "The Song of the Dead."

If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid in full!

And -- like the header says -- I was kind of reading "Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose", and writing about what happens after the end of the story and the epilogue (funerals. oh god), and listening to a Scott/Jean fanmix, and now I'm on the edge of tears. (Funerals. Funerals. More than one of them! Two for major characters!)

Of course I write all the superbly depressing scenes now. I love Kipling with the fire of a thousand burning suns, but I'm not even kidding, the least depressing scene I wrote was a flashback scene from the first wave that involves a ghost Rokasan spaceship. (From "The Merchantmen":

(Till, through the red tornado,
That lashed us nigh to blind,
We saw The Dutchman plunging,
Full canvas, head to wind!)

The rest of it is death, and the moments before and after, and what happens when you're left all alone and you can't figure out why you survived and not the ones that deserve it.

(Final count: one funeral, one "why does Earth look like home now when it didn't before?", one "oh god, why did they leave me?", one "once more unto the breach for motherfucking revenge", one "why the hell is the ghost spaceship shooting at us", one "god, we'll never see people like this again.")