Disclaimer: Trigun, nope, I don't own it, never have, but I'm not only poor, I'm in debt, so anybody who wants to sue me is going to get what is in my pockets and that is lint.
Additional: Rem's aunt…um…I apologize ahead of time if I misspell the word or it shouldn't have an accent…I was trying to remember my Spanish and lost my Spanish-English dictionary and am kicking myself for it. Gotta be in my bedroom here somewhere…
THE ANGEL AND THE WARRIOR
Chapter 1
"More coffee, Mr. Burnside?"
"No, Rem, I'm fine. You may go now."
I wanted to scream at the pudgy, balding man in front of me, sitting at his desk all smug and superior. I did not know how much more I could take. Coffee…coffee! That's all Mr. Burnside ever had me do; dictate letters, simple filing, and getting him coffee. Sure, I was the newest intern at the America Daily, but I was capable of much more than fetching coffee!
My life had been out of control lately. This summer things were only a little more stable than they had been. I decided to change majors last semester – for the fifth time. I wanted to be reporter this time, work for a newspaper, cover national and world events. I was going to need a lot more school before ever reaching that, and had gotten this internship by sheer luck and by skills learned through the pursuit of previous majors. The worst part about this summer was that I was living with my parents and younger brother and heard from Daddy every day about how the money he was paying for my college education was going down the toilet and me deciding on something and getting my life together.
My workday was over and I decided to take a detour before going home. I looked down the city streets, bathed in twilight. This was my favorite time of the day, though it filled me with a sadness. At sunset, I felt as though the struggles and strife of a day were finally at their end, yet that all the potential of the day was lost, and that all the happy times of the day were fading away into the recesses of memory.
The sunset was blazing, painting the streets, the cars, the buildings, and wandering pedestrians a bloody red color. The western horizon held a great beauty, but I knew why the sunsets here were so dark: air pollution. My aunt Fé told me stories about when she was a child…that the sunsets were not as colorful back then, and there were fewer crowds, and about a river her father used to take her fishing at that is now devoid of all life. The environment – globally- was in a crisis not known since the late 1970s. In the late 1980s and 1990s, some cleanup had occurred, but the land, sea, and the air, nonetheless, and grown progressively less healthy. What had saved us in recent decades were the Plants.
The Plants were a technology developed by the United States, a purely clean-burning form of energy. Few people outside government technicians knew exactly how they worked, and it was a close guarded secret, kept from the public in the interest of national security. Most of Europe was using the Plants in the last decade, as well, but many other countries did not have them, and tensions between them and the western world had been building for some time.
Despite the Plants, the Earth was still becoming increasingly hostile to life. Hundreds of species had met extinction since the turn of the millenium and people were dying at much younger ages than they did in aunt Fé's childhood, mostly from various forms of cancer. There was talk of a project by NASA, a fleet of starships to carry people and animals through space until a planet hospitable to earthly life could be found. There were already people signing up to be considered for cryogenic freezing in preparation for the journey, and a few solar systems found to have planets were set to be explored, though none knew of if these were conducive to life yet. Many people held out hope for the Earth. Others didn't, and some just wanted the chance to explore other worlds, to satiate a wanderlust or perhaps just to escape the world they had known. I could relate.
A little black cat ran across the street in front of me, causing a car to swerve. The driver shook his fist out of the window and shouted an expletive. The cat sat on the other side of the street nonchalantly and licked its hind paw, almost a gesture of defiance, though I knew not whether cats could experience that emotion or not.
The street was clear and I crossed. I reached out to the cat to try to pet it, but it just stared at me with wide green eyes and ran off. The Springfield Cemetery was just a block and a half away. I started singing softly to myself, an old song that Aunt Fé used to sing to me as a child.
"So…on the first evening a pebble from somewhere out of nowhere drops upon the dreaming world…
So…on the second celestial evening, all the children of their pebbles joined hands and composed a waltz…
Sound life…"
She said it was an old folk song and unlike many of the other songs that she sang, she only knew it in English and, strangely enough, in Japanese, and not her native Spanish. She sang it when working in the garden, when singing my brothers and I to sleep as babies…she said it came into her mind whenever she was happy…or very sad.
My feet crunched dead leaves as I came to the eastern edge of the cemetery, reading the names on the headstones as I went. I came to the one I was looking for and stood before the grave. Vash Saverem, my little brother.
He had died when he was only eight years old, from a rare form of leukemia. I don't remember much from those days, except watching him waste away and my aunt rocking me back and forth in an embrace singing "Sound Life" at the funeral. I suppose my mind chose not to recollect those days in great detail, as the mind does sometimes when grief is too great to bear. I remembered Vash's bright smile, his laugh, and his generous heart. My poor youngest brother, Knives, never truly got to know him, being two years old when Vash died.
Knives was in high school now, a sophomore. He was really into skateboarding and liked to gel his hair in short black spikes. He had a very cocky attitude and Daddy told him that he'd never amount to much, but I believed otherwise.
I ran my index finger along the "V" of Vash's name carved into the headstone, tracing the bold serifs. Mom and dad had a penchant for unusual names. My own full given name was Remembrance, which they chose for its depth and beauty and because they knew no one with that name. Vash was originally going to be Ashton, then just Ash, but my father decided that it was too common and decided to add the V. Knives, perhaps, had the most interesting name of all. Whenever people heard it, they thought it was a nickname and not his true given name. The story went, as I was too young when he was born to remember it, our parents had not decided on a name for him. When holding him in her arms just after his birth, my mother said that his bright blue eyes pierced into her inmost soul like knives, and thus "Knives" was what he was dubbed.
I left the cemetery and walked to the freeway overpass nearby. I stood there, thinking, for the longest time. The wind whipped about me, cool and comforting. When I was a kid, certain classmates of mine would come here and spit, aiming for the windshields of the passing cars below. Sometimes they would spit gum or drop tomatoes. These were the same people who used to make fun of me – mostly for my name. "Rem" was a common insult, short for "remedial", but the kids insulted me even when I insisted on being called Remembrance.
I spread my arms out, pretending they were wings and that I was a bird. I wondered, if I truly wished it, if I could fly. I wanted to leave everything behind; to fly into the sunset darkened sky, above the city and the world. I wanted to be like a hawk, soaring above a desert vista, free from grief and without troubles. Before I realized what I was doing, I lifted one foot and placed it on the ledge of the overpass, then stepped fully up on it. There was a way I could fly…was it so far down? Was I ready for eternity?
I had always been taught that life was sacred. My aunt Fé especially believed this. She wouldn't even kill the little spiders she sometimes found in her home, instead she would cup them in her hands or take a cup from the kitchen cupboard to capture them with and place them out in her garden. Once staying at her house I was left alone while she was across the street talking to the neighbors. I found a huge spider which I thought was a tarantula… Too scared to try to handle the thing like Fé did, I put a paper cup over it, taped the rim to the floor, and labeled it "Spider" with a crayon for my aunt to deal with when she got back…But here, I'm rambling again…
Life was a precious gift never to be wasted, that is what I was always told. Still, I had trouble believing that my life was worth very much. Here I was, a confused person, not sure what to do with her gift of life, a disappointment to her parents and afraid of the future. Eternity did not scare me, but what was between now and then. I wondered if it was so wrong for me to just fly away…to no longer be a burden.
"Hey, lady! Step down from there! Please!" a voice behind me cried. I turned around.
"Please! Whatever it is…it's not worth it!" the young man stood there, desperation in his eyes. He was wearing camouflage; "U.S. Air Force" was emblazoned in blue above one of his shirt pockets and "SSgt Thatcher" above the other. He was obviously from the base, probably going to his off-base home after work. He was tall and blond. He had unusual hair: it was spiky and stood off his head like a broom, and it was longer than the hair of most military men I saw, who generally were shaved to baldness or near-baldness.
He reached out to me. I stepped down from the ledge. "Why should you care so much about me?" I asked, "You don't even know me."
"I don't like to see lives wasted." He said. "I see here a beautiful young woman about to throw her life away. Let me help you…I can take you somewhere…or just listen, if you'd like. Tell me, what makes you want to jump off this bridge?"
I stepped closer to him. He took my hands in his, gently. Tears welled up in my eyes and streamed down my cheeks.
"I suppose I should introduce myself," he said. "My name is Alex Thatcher."
END CHAPTER 1
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More coming, though I plan to work at a leisurely pace, so it might be a while before there is a next chapter. I have been busy with college final projects…and as I am about to graduate, I need to look for work and all that good stuff. Also, it is good for me to let the plans I have in mind for this story to sit a while and for those plot-ideas to gather more detailed ideas to themselves. Special thanks to Naomi Athena and to Jammer – who actually did that to a spider once.
Lady Shadowcat out, Love and Peace!