Dream Tales: The Space Marine's Daughter

Hello. This is an introduction to what I will call "Dream Tales". These will be chronicles of vivid and interesting dreams that I have had and wish to share. I originally started this on my Facebook, and now I will start to post them here as well. What follows below is one of the first postings I wrote. It was originally written June 13 of 2013. I hope you enjoy:

I was a simple Space Marine, and I was stationed in a colony on the edge of human-controlled space. The colony was housed on a planet which featured snow-capped mountains, temperate forests, and rolling green hills. Yet another power laid claim to this paradise. An alien empire (to be specific, the Tau Empire from Warhammer 40k) claimed they possessed the planet before we did, even though they had no structures on the planet. This inevitably led to conflict.

I fought in the conflict and I was determined to defend the colony because it held someone special to me: my 3-year-old daughter. She was all I had left, because her mom had been killed in a crossfire between the human and alien forces. Yet another "casualty of war". We fought hard, but eventually the order came to abandon the colony and evacuate. We were outnumbered and supremely outgunned. We had no choice. My daughter and I were apart of the last groups because there was no one else to take her when the non-essential personnel were evacuated first.

However as we began leave, I noticed some crates full of candy. They were meant for a Halloween celebration which was cancelled. I carried my daughter, set her down on a nearby crate, and asked her which bag she would like. She didn't really understand what was going on and looked at me nervously. I asked her again and got the same response, so I settled on 20-lbs bag of M&Ms. "Is this okay?" I asked, and she nodded nervously and finally smiled a little. I began to walk, thinking she would jump off the crate and followed. I turned around and found her still on the crate. She was waiting for me to pay someone for the candy. I smiled and said, "Don't worry baby. Daddy will take care of it. Daddy will pay them later." "Okay," she said and smiled. As I retrieved her, I made eye contact with another personnel (who looked like one of my female co-workers). She gave me a knowing smile, and I smiled and winked at her. I was knowingly committing an act of outright theft. However I probably wouldn't be punished for it because:

1) It was practically the end of the world, and the candy would be abandoned in favor of essential food items. And...

2) I hoped the candy would cheer up my daughter, because in addition to losing her mom, she was losing the only home she ever known.

We proceeded to the upper levels of the colony, and I turned to call to her (my daughter's name was Curina, I imagined her mom named her). For the first time, I was horrified by how fragile she looked. She was tiny. She barely reached my knee height. Her arms and legs were skinny, almost sickly. I was terrified of what would happen to this fragile little being, and I was determined to protect her from the horrors of the universe...

...And then I woke up. And I began to question what I really wanted out of life.