Silence Around You
This is my attempt at writing a Fanfiction about Legato's past that isn't suffering from
" Abusive- father/cherished- younger -sister -syndrome." It is important that you understand that in the story, Legato's " talent" allows him to read minds. Also, I will use the star for spoken words and the quotation marks for thoughts, because this story deals mostly in thoughts. For an all around explanation, read chapter Two.
Disclaimer: I do not own my life, nor know where my soul is, so how can I own someone elses' dream? ( Trans: I don't... own ... Trigun... at...ALL! )
Silence. Complete and perfect silence. In my life, I have rarely experienced the quiet absence of pain that goes with this. Only when with you... can I block out everything, can I see someones' lips move and not hear them. Here, In Death, I can hear your voice as I never could in life. Thank you.
Ch. 1 Sound of Scorn
Ever since I was a child, I could hear the thoughts of all those around me, their pain, their selfishness, I was a witness to it all. My mother was a prostitute; the first words I remember hearing - she said with such an superficial, motherly smile - were ! useless ! I have to get away from him! I'll send him to cleaning the beds, the worst ones. Terrifying monster than he is, that'll teach him to look at me with those demon's eyes My mother!, my own mother, hated me for being born, hated me and blamed me for every little wrinkle she had, for the fact that she thought after I was born, men no longer looked at her the same way. She would make up punishments in her head whenever she was forced to be with me, then inflict them in such a way that she seemed the voice of reason. She would say Legato, I am so tired..., do you think you can handle doing this - and- this...? with a look in her eyes that would make any unsuspecting child think he was being allowed the privilege of helping his mother. I, however, was well aware that my mother was playing off that instinct that she thought any normal child would have, - the desire to prove themselves " grown -up. " I had no such instinct. Since when have I, Legato Bluesummers, needed to prove anything to anyone?
As a child, not so guarded and sound driven, I would occasionally let the sorrow show in my eyes when I was sent to do a task. When older, I would come to make a sport out of this, listening to the fevered sound of her nightmarish thoughts " he knows, he knows, he knows, ...." a glance in my direction " how can he look at me with those dead eyes, like drowning pools. How can he see everything in that glance of tainted eyes? He is not natural, not real, not like I am, ... real. He knows..., how much I hate him. Why? How can he know how I hate him ? "
Once and only once, did I get something other than cruel amusement from these mental rambles of hers. It was the one time I heard of my father. " ... his eyes are so horrible, so cold, so unlike his fathers, which were the warm and sparkling summer blue sky... Bluesummers, ha, you are never what I hoped for. I hoped for a little bit of him! Legato... Hah! You are a smooth, elegant, snake, never him, never like him! But, no , no, I lost you to July, you never even left an shadow of a memory of that bloody trenchcoat you always wore." After that, it was back into the downward spiral of pointless, chaotic, thoughts that I could never avoid hearing .
Listening, yes, but never hearing.
In this place of fornication and filth, I had to hear every worry and grievance, and every thought whispered through clenched teeth. Is it any wonder than, that I avoided with a will any excursions into public, where I had to shout to hear myself over the wailed thoughts of others? Until the day I met Knives-sama, I would never hear a spoken voice, just the actual thought. What is Speech, but the ghostly echo of Thought? I could never hear my mother over the cry of the rabble, so she came to assume that I was terminally deaf and couldn't concentrate on reading lips with people jostling and bumping me in a crowd. This made no sense, but simple solutions for the simple. I am neither deaf nor dumb, neither simple nor stupid. I am Legato Bluesummers, and I can not hear her any longer.
Once, and only once, as a child, did I hear silence. I was sleepwalking to market, envisioning myself as dead to lessen the ache of voices in my head and the pain of my beaten, exhausted form. Although ever since I turned seven I was regularly beaten,( for children who were seven were considered "marketable "and I was no such thing under any circumstances..) it was particularly painful and was probably intended to be fatal. I had baited my mother and pulled her off the edge of her sanity into the abyss in which I make my home. Screaming the sounds feral wounded animals make, she had fled to the resident bodyguard, who tried to calm her... for every bloody scratch she drew down his face in her madness, I suffered tenfold. As the only person who had been in the room when her apparently spontaneous madness occurred, it was my fault. Although it was my fault, these humans did not know that, but their logic is skewed, so here I am, suffering.
As I drew near to the market, thankfully lost in thought, far from the problems of my battered body, amid the claustrophobic walls of the whorehouse I took residence in - I will never call it " home ."- a shadow lengthened while I was in an alley. Before my normally alert mind could register that there was a person, a piercing pain descended from the sky and then I was abducted off to a squalid den by a ruffian who would never see the sunset again. Later, in my remote room I would contemplate this and decide that the reasons I overlooked this man were presumably: 1. I was suffering from temporary brain damage, ( I regenerate ) and 2. The fool's thought patterns were nearly indistinguishable from those of someone who's' I had memorized, so I overlooked him. He was not making any secret of his lewd thoughts, which I had to listen to the entire time we were going there. From this I interpreted that we were going to a place I had heard of by way of a prostitute " rescued" from there. Judging from what I knew, I was not going to live for very long... I believe that this was the point at which my self- control began to crack, tormented by the rough feel of the mans shoulder, the horrible slime covering the sack he was wearing and the knowledge of my impending fate.
As he walked in the door, my limp form slung over his back, I was greeted with an abomination of a smell that emanated from the rotting wooden walls of a squalid room and its residents, who were indistinguishable from the walls in their filth. They cheered as they leered at me, surveying their next diversion, roaring their thoughts of what they would do to me... Their lust was deafening. Terrified, and taxed beyond anything a mortal should've been able to withstand, my self control dissipated like weak mist before the sun and I screamed long repressed feelings at their resounding hearts. And then... everything stopped. Their pathetic panicked hearts unerringly bowed to my frenzied command and simultaneously burst and stopped. The man clutching me slumped to the ground, the heat of his body fleeing as he did so. The hollow underground silence was pure ecstacy to my tired form. I lingered there in the doorway, listening to the perfect quiet of their deaths, the death of everyone, to me. Everything seemed so slow to me as I collapsed in the doorway, taking with me the comforting thought that I could hear nothing. I could hear...
.... Silence.
SM: Hah, ha! Looks at Fanfiction Blame the Hot Cheetos, I guess. Just in time for Mothers Day... Errr. sweatdrop Please Review? You were complaining, so I edited it and now it is slightly longer... I wanted to end in the same place... so...