Title: Boots On The Ground

Author: Wonderland

Rating: G

Disclaimer: Don’t own ‘em, wish I did, you know who does, yadda, yadda, yadda

Summary: He’d always felt grounded to the earth beneath his feet.

Season/Spoiler info: none.

Boots On The Ground

With a feeling he didn’t yet recognize as arrogance, the excited six-year-old slipped agilely into the tomb entrance and nipped around behind his father’s students. They might have been a dozen years older than him but they had less of a developed sense of direction than one of the city folks who occasionally drove out to look at a real tomb.

The child liked his new shoes, looking down at his wiggling toes; sandals or bare feet were the standard in the desert although he’d seen a few people with soft leather to the knee. On a recent trip to Athens, his mother had taken him into a shoe store-imagine a whole store that just sold one thing!-and gotten him measured for the strange sandals. Instead of laces, there were odd pieces of metal that helped cinch the soft strips of leather around his suntanned feet.

He’d never had a pair of sandals not bought from an open air stall in the town market square, that hadn’t been made by worn but nimble fingers.

*

Sneakers became his means of escape; he quickly learned how to tread softly on creaking stairs, a must when sneaking out of the foster home. They were also helpful when he agilely skinned up a tree to sneak back into the house. He’d only been caught a few times before he figured it out, how to hide and walk softly, pretend to be asleep, how to make his escape and his return to a house that might have caged his body but couldn’t hold his broken heart.

*

He was absently lacing up his boots when he realized the action had become so second nature to him, that he could do-and indeed had done-so with frightening urgency in some dark corner of a far-off world.

He’d initially hated the boots. The high, rigid sides, the overly-long strings, the way they had to be laced up a certain way and tied a certain way in order to be acceptable. And he’d hated how everyone’s boots looked like everyone else’s; no room for individuality in military footwear.

When, he wondered, had these boots become part of who he was, whether he was on base or off? When had he stopped changing the second he was allowed to, exchanged the stiff, uncomfortable boots for well-worn sneakers or soft, supple loafers? And when was the last time he’d gone barefoot just to feel the sand beneath his feet?

Jumping when he heard a voice shouting his name, he finished lacing his boots quickly, grabbed his jacket and charged out of the gear-up room.