By Vasiliki, Dec 00 & Jan 01. The version below: Mar 01.
Beta reader: Cassiopeia.
This story is dedicated to Stephanie. Special thanks to DaMoyre for liking it so much and to Cassiopeia for her enthusiastic feedback. =)
The big wooden wheels shrieked as the frenzied horses galloped faster and faster, foam pouring off their mouths. The circus wagon was trying to slalom its way through the explosions, bombs dropping and blackened craters opening all around it. The fire... Fire... everywhere.
"Mommy!" cried the small girl, as the woman's arms loosened around her and she found herself falling off the wagon. "Mommy!!!"
"CATHERINE!"
A panicked scream of a desperate mother, her eyes wide with horror locked with violet tearful ones for an eternity inside a moment, before they got lost among the fumes and the flames. A watery curtain came down veiling the little girl's world, her body hit the ground and she was enveloped in darkness.
The horses in amok bolted faster than the wheels could hold. The man on the driver's seat pulled with all his force at the reigns.
"Take the baby! I can't keep both the reigns and him!" he shouted at his wife, just before an explosion hit too close, jolting the wagon and making the man lose his hold on the infant. The mother's open arms extended towards the small body that flew through the air. Both parents screamed.
"My child! MY CHILD!" shouted the woman, but a rapidly approaching shrill sound covered her voice. The bomb fell and fire overwhelmed them.
The destroyed wagon toppled onto its side and kept burning. Black smoke rose and the nauseating smell of human flesh turning to coals filled the nostrils of the surviving infant who tried to crawl towards the remains. His green eyes reflected the red glow of the flames eating away at the wood, the horses, the corpses of his parents. The wind rose and the fire flared up. The heat wave caused him to creep back, yet his eyes remained fixed.
Not a single tear came to cool them. They had all dried in the swelter of his misery.
A few years later, a scrawny boy stood on a wide fallow field, gazing at dark starry heavens.
'Space...' he thought. 'The space must be better than being here.'
The twinkling stars shone down at him, cold and unyielding. Sudden wind bent the long grasses and tousled the child's bangs and caressed his dirty face.
'The coldness of space can put out the fires of my dreams', he thought.
Every night, the boy stood alone for a long time looking upwards at the immensity of cosmos, as the night breeze blew through the grass field, only it ever embracing the childish body.
"Can't you cry for slaughtering your comrades?" she reprimanded him.
"I used up all my tears as a baby", he deigned to reply.
"For how long will you keep up killing your own heart?" she shot back.
His darkened gaze bore at her.
"For as long as I live."
Two bullets hit the traitorous devices. The cross shattered and the shards held the green eye. He turned and left, leaving her crying his name, the absence of his name.
"I love you!" she had shouted and the tears in her voice resounded in his head.
The cross. Love. Names. Things that had numbed his soul. On one side there was himself and his captain, but on the other side there were the ones who raised him and the young species teacher was among them. The merciless boy was the only one who would come out alive. Again. Always. Hammered on the battlefield, ever composed, regretless.
"You aren't human", his captain had accused him.
"No", he had agreed. "I've always been only a soldier."
Even when he stopped listening to their dying voices and choking curses, years later, he would still taste her tears in his dreams. The tears of the sole survivor of those battles, the tears he couldn't shed.