Soldiers and Sinners: A Memoir

Rated: K.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." - ( T.S. Eliot )

Part I.

The sand on Titan blew across everything and spared nothing. The desert smelled strongly of recent war; blood and shrapnel, sweat and soldiers. The cloying haze of ammunition that blanketed and stifled in the air like a lungfull of cigarette smoke. Titan; where you couldn't afford to make friends, but everyone was a comrade because there was nothing else left to believe in.

Some people still had something to fight for, of course. Their friends and families, wives and children. Most of the time it was just the basic human instinct to survive that spurred them on. The desire to perservere and to live. The fighting made them feel like there was a reason to keep going-- even after everything that happened. Even in the worst times; even when the cards were down and the beer was stale, and these soldiers fucked, fought, ate, drank, and gambled on Titan, sometimes for that desire, sometimes just for that instinct, but for the most part because for that moment in time, when you were on Titan, you were made acutely aware of your time and you knew that you weren't going to live forever. Maybe not even to the end of tomorrow. So they kept fighting. Day after day. Just to live.

And by the time they were six months into the war, there wasn't one man there who cried for anything.

Not even for death.

Part II.

Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener fell in love with a mysterious, stone-faced soldier with silver hair and a dead smile, who carried a music box, and later a sword. That man had saved his life.

And he had taken it away.

Part III.

Even when they locked him up, raped him and beat him and fed him the pills for insomnia, and his hair grew long like a black halo of sweat and grime against the sunken hollows of his too-thin face, still young but looking so old now, only the ghost of former innocence, and his eyes became the hopeless hyacinth blues of the dying-- like bruises or water, always wet, that pooled blue into his cheekbones-- and his skin both hung off of his bones like lines of dirty laundry underneath his prison clothes and sprouted up, trembling and swollen, where a flat expanse of flesh once was, he could not hate Vicious. His Judas. The one who betrayed him. The one who condemned him to a lifetime in hell for a crime that he never committed.

It nearly drove him insane that he couldn't hate Vicious.

And the nightmares were only of him.

Part IV.

Gren's youth was left on Titan in a veil of rags. A handful of dust that blew on forever; Talking of nothing to no one. Remembering nothing.

I play the saxophone. I like men. I look just like my mother. . .

The man who destroyed me. The man who ruined my life.

What's the name of that tune? Maybe I could play it on my sax when I get home.

. . .I trusted you. . .I believed in you. . .

When I get home. . .

I'm not afraid to die.

Vicious. . .

. . .Vicious. . .

We were all comrades on Titan.

I believed in you. . .!

Part V.

Silenced.

Vicious would hear the silence, sometimes. Feel the sandstorms thrashing against the confines of his skin, the metallic clang of gunfire reverberating in his bones. He could almost hear the silence. And he could almost forget.

But never for long.

Part VI.

He saw small children with their mothers walking down the street, some days, and their eyes were so blue that he watched them, though he tried not to; indigo blue, like fresh out of the dye. Holding an animal's collar or a guardian's hand or the string of a balloon, unsuspecting. He saw women like Julia, too. Sleek and golden-haired. All red lipstick lips and dangerous curves and hollow smiles. But those blue eyes. . .all awash in the most broken kind of truth, unshed tears hanging on the lashes, so betrayed. . .the kind of knowledge that comes too late. . .when he saw them shining at him out of faces, old and young and small and wide and in between, he didn't think of Julia at all.

He remembered a different kind of angel entirely.

One that he'd murdered a long time ago. Even if he wasn't as dead as Vicious was. Even if he wasn't buried under the ground.

He remembered.

Part VII.

And when he died. . .

He asked the man with the two different colored eyes to send him back to Titan.

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust" . . .

And with a blood-splattered smile on his face, he whispered out loud in the darkness,

"I am not afraid to die."

And maybe, just maybe, he thinks. . .
Maybe you never really forgot me, either.

. . . the end.