The lieutenant walked somberly up to me in the crowded walkway of decapitated foreign bodies. He raised both hands up to his forehead and stiffly saluted me simultaneously with each.

“Sir,” he said with a look of defeat on his face, “the brothers…”

Reading the melancholy look in his eyes, I took off running down the aisle, hurdling over piles of the enemy scattered all about the grocery store.

Turning the corner at the end of the aisle, my heart dropped down through my feet to the ground as I gazed upon the aftermath and fell to my knees. There in two chairs facing each other were my alien comrades, brothers as it were, sitting limply and almost lifelessly. Struggling through the last bits of pain, their thin arms set delicately on the arm rests of their chairs struggling to reach out to one another.

I began to cry.

Kneeling beside them, I softly grasped each of their hands and laid them atop one another as the distant stares in their eyes became more vacant with each passing moment. I placed my hand on theirs, lowered my head, and sobbed relentlessly as my breaths became short.

When I looked up, the two brothers were hunched over and almost motionless setting next to one another staring longingly into each other’s black, moribund eyes. They gazed deep into each other souls consoling their sibling in their final moments, staying connected down to the last second. I laid my other hand atop their touching hands and cried gasping for air as I kneeled there next to their dying bodies.

As they passed, I felt the greatest sense of love I have ever felt for this set of alien brothers, whom I had never before met.