Let History Call Me Coward.

"Fall back! FALL BACK!" a soldier screamed, voice hoarse and blood-spattered.

Finchley or Lee Min-jae, no, whatever he was now stumbled into a staggered jog, heart pounding, sword hanging awkwardly in his left hand. His body felt foreign, taller, broader, heavier. His boots were soaked, his coat torn at the collar, and his scalp ached beneath a rain-drenched officer's cap.

The ledger still floated beside him, flipping pages faster than any book should.

His boots slid in the mud as he darted past a broken cannon, heart hammering in his chest. The screams of dying men chased him, but something else was beginning to claw at him too...something not his own.

A sharp pain bloomed in his temple.

Then it hit.

A rush of images. Emotions. Voices that were too loud and too close. A child crying over a portrait. A woman in a blue dress turning away in silence. A general's hand slamming down a discharge letter. Gold epaulettes stripped from a uniform. Men whispering behind his back.

Coward. Useless. Unfit to command.

He staggered, nearly fell.

He wasn't just inside Finchley's body. He was being buried alive under his grief.

Faces, names, betrayals. Every humiliation carved into this man's soul came flooding in, demanding to be remembered. A dishonored courtship. A best friend's letter of denouncement. Orders rewritten behind his back. And the final disgrace, abandoned by his regiment after trying to stop a suicidal charge.

Lee Min-jae gasped, clutching his head. His own betrayal still burned fresh, but this... this was something deeper. Older. Finchley had died long before the battlefield claimed him.

He had lived knowing he was branded a coward, and yet still showed up for the next war.

He looked around at the trenches, at the dead and dying. The weight of two lives pressed into his ribs.

"Get up, Captain!" someone shouted nearby.

Min-jae looked at the young soldier struggling to drag a wounded comrade. A boy. Barely shaving.

Finchley had known his name. Tommy. From Kent. Min-jae didn't know how, but the knowledge came all the same.

Tommy had trusted him once.

Min-jae's breath caught. His instincts screamed to run, to survive. But Finchley's memories pulled at his spine with something else.

Obligation.

Guilt.

He turned, teeth clenched, and sprinted back through the slush toward the boy.

"Get him over the ridge!" Min-jae shouted.

Tommy's eyes widened. "Captain?"

"Now!"

Together they heaved the wounded soldier up the incline. Another volley of musket fire cracked above them, spitting dirt and blood into the air.

They made it behind a half-shattered carriage.

Tommy collapsed, panting. "You came back…"

Min-jae didn't answer right away. He stared down at his own trembling hands. Not his hands. Finchley's hands.

But maybe that didn't matter now.

He looked at the ledger. Its pages stilled.

Memory resonance confirmed.

A most intimate intrusion, but necessary. You are now in possession of not just his body, but his disgrace.

The echoes of Captain Finchley's shame, sorrow, and splendid failures are now firmly lodged behind your eyes. Do try not to waste them.

Stability is Precarious.

Dignity is Theoretical.

I suggest you gather loyalty like coin, and rewrite this tale before history brands you a coward... again.

Min-jae smirked faintly.

So Finchley had been used, just like he had. Tossed aside. Rewritten by men with cleaner reputations and dirtier hands. Different battlefield. Same story.

"Get some rest, Tommy," he said, voice low. "I'll handle what's next."

He stood, saber gripped tighter now. His breath came easier. The panic was gone.

The first plan was simple and that was to survive this war. And to do that, there was only one move left.

Retreat.

He smirked.

"Let history call me a coward, just not a dead one."

A bullet whizzed past his ear. Someone screamed nearby, and a soldier collapsed into the trench beside him, face half gone.

"God!"

Reflexively, Finchley ducked low and scrambled for cover behind a pile of corpses and sandbags. He tried to breathe, but his chest wheezed like a dying bellows.

"Sir!"

A young private slid beside him, barely eighteen and shaking. "Captain Finchley, the flank's breaking. They say you're ordering retreat?"

Finchley blinked.

This was it, wasn't it? The moment. The accusation. The history books would scream "COWARD." This was the infamous decision that would ruin this man's life and now his.

He could stand and charge forward like a hero and die in five seconds flat.

Or…

He could retreat and save lives.

Finchley nodded once, firmly. "We pull back. Reroute through the southeast ridge and signal the field surgeon to prep the wagons."

"But, sir, the general said..."

"The general isn't here," he snapped. "I am."

He locked eyes with the boy. "If you want to die for glory, charge the cannons. If you want to drink brandy tomorrow, fall back with me."

And he turned, mud-slick, grimy, wheezing, and retreated.

Later that night…

Silence blanketed the camp like ash. The guns had stopped.

Captain Alistair Finchley sat alone on a crate outside the battered surgeon's tent. His coat was torn. His boots had dried with mud crusted into the laces. His saber lay across his knees, untouched.

Inside his tent, the ledger hovered, glowing faintly by candlelight.

⚜ From the Margins of the Ledger ⚜

On the matter of the retreat at dusk, beneath the smoke-veiled sky:

The field drank deep, as it always does. Twelve brave or broken souls gave their final breath to Crimean soil, and not a single one will have statues. Their names are lost, but not unnoticed.

And yet thirty-eight remain.

Not by fortune.

Not by command.

But by the cowardice of a man too clever to die for someone else's glory.

The spoils of such discretion?

A compass, pried from a dead Ottoman's coat its needle still twitching.

A silver flask, dented and drained of trust.

A pouch of battlefield-grade opium, likely more loyal than your regiment.

As for your name, good sir.

"The Coward of Crimea."

No court has declared it.

No ink has sealed it.

Yet the words spread—low, fevered, contagious.

You have survived.

But survival, in this empire, is a form of treason.

Prepare thy uniform.

They will summon you soon.

And this time, your sword may not be enough.

Finchley ran a hand through his damp red hair and exhaled slowly.

"Same system, different battlefield," he muttered. "And this one drinks laudanum instead of coffee."

He stood up, squinted toward the dying firelight of the camp, and stretched his aching neck.

The soldiers wouldn't meet his gaze.

Behind one tent, he overheard them whispering.

"He ran."

"We should've charged."

"They say he's half-French. Explains the retreat."

"Coward."

"But I'm alive, ain't I?"

Finchley didn't argue.

He simply pulled a cigar from someone else's coat pocket, struck a match, and watched the sparks flicker in the breeze.

"Let them talk," he murmured.

"I'm not dying for an empire that can't balance its own ledgers. I am going to retire."

He took a long drag on the cigar, let the smoke curl like strategy from his lips.

He glanced at the hovering ledger.

"Ah yes... the tribunal awaits. Try not to stammer."