So no matter what you been through, no matter what you into
No matter what you see when you look outside your window
Brown grass or green grass, picket fence or barbed wire
Never ever put them down, you just lift your arms higher
Raise 'em 'til your arms tired, let 'em know you here
That you struggling, survivin', that you gon' persevere

- Lupe Fiasco
"The Show Goes On"

Young Lions

(2.5/3)

The Remains of a Summer Memory

(in the distant and not so distant past)

"The sun's coming up," she said. "You should head back to camp."

"Not tired."

"You won't get any breakfast out here. If you don't get in line for rations now, you'll go hungry today."

"I have work to do." He was adament. In the mornings after sentry duty, he collected fire wood. He had a bundle of sticks in his arms at the moment, proving his worth to the operation.

She dropped to one knee before him. Her calloused hands cupped both sides of his small face. "All right then," she said. "A good soldier follows orders. Aunt Florina is your commander until I return. Don't upset her, don't disobey her. I'll be disappointed if you do. You'll hear from us when we need you."

She rose to full height. The sun broke through the hills behind her, covering the fields in orange and gold. She carried her sword at her hip.

"You'll take good care of things while I'm gone, won't you, Roy?"

Years later, the shrapnel lodged in his bones still gave him phantom pains.

Sometimes, though, the damage was real rather than imagined.

During his first pro-qualifying match, Roy ate a standing kick to the body that fractured two ribs and loosened the fragments of a bullet that had been embedded there ever since the last days of the war, ever since the chaos of his childhood. The fragments lacerated his liver, causing a severe bleed that sent him to the hospital for emergency surgery. He was out of commission for weeks, waiting for those wounds to heal.

When he came back, his nerves were shot. Less than an hour before his first match since rehab, he paced like a caged animal in the locker room, trying to fix his cape but finding himself unable to close the hooks properly. He kicked over a trash bin in frustration.

The door to the locker room opened. Roy didn't notice, not until a pair of hands reached out in his direction.

He flinched.

Marth took the front of Roy's cape and fastened the hooks with deft fingers. He tugged at the edges of the uniform so that it fit properly over Roy's shoulders. He seemed completely indifferent to the burning glare that was being thrown at him.

When Marth was finished, he stepped back. Roy would have thanked him, but the newly healed injury on his right side started to throb right then. His body still remembered the pain. His body still held a grudge. His body wasn't prepared to forgive, not yet.

"Are you ready?"

The question startled Roy out of his thoughts. "Yeah."

"Then let's go."

Marth turned to leave. He wasn't in battle ready attire, meaning he wasn't scheduled to fight that day. Roy had scanned the event program the day before without reading it. Per Smash tradition, fighters were never told who their opponents were prior to a match.

"Wait."

Marth stopped. "Yes?"

"Gotta ask you something."

Marth turned to face him, one eyebrow raised, the other hidden by soft blue bangs. "And?"

Back when they were both in training camp, Roy would have clocked him for that look, that goddamn look, the one that made it clear that you were beneath him. But not today.

Today he grabbed Marth by the front of his shirt and slammed him against the nearest row of steel lockers.

"What are you - "

Hearing the surprise and uncertainty in that voice just about made Roy's day. And then he surged forward and crushed their lips together, pressing Marth up against the wall. He could feel the tension in every muscle in Marth's body, and he thought that his rival would fight him. But Marth tolerated it for longer than Roy expected, until Roy pushed his tongue through, into that warm mouth, and then he was shoved away, so hard that he stumbled backwards.

He looked up, caught his breath, and waited for Marth to say something.

Instead, Marth just shook his head.

Roy had reached his limits. "What?! You done with me? Is that it? You in the pro league now, so you don't wanna even acknowledge me? I'm not worth your time? Is that it?"

When they were both in training, things had been different. In a crowd of strangers, in close quarters, they had orbited around each other, near enough to know each other but never near enough to touch. They both came from backwards third world countries on the same isolated continent. Marth wore his clothes from home with a quiet sort of pride, indifferent to the stares he got on the street. But Roy shoved his old clothes into a duffel bag, which he kept under his bed. Then he went and spent his first meager paycheck on a set of modern shirts and pants that he had to wash every few days because he only owned so many.

When the other Smash hopefuls gathered together in the evenings after practice, Roy sat with them and played cards, well aware that they only laughed at his jokes because he was their clown. It didn't matter. He had no one left in the world he could call family. So he would have to make himself a new family. It was either that or be alone.

Marth had stood out among that crowd. It was well known that he was their top student. When recruiters and sponsors came to visit, Marth always got the most attention. He was too good, too perfect - and way the hell too pretty. A few of the guys had a habit of blowing kisses in his direction whenever he walked by. Instead of making a joke out of it, Marth had ignored them, to the effect that the resentment against him only grew.

"Are your people always that stuck up?" they had asked Roy.

"I'm not Altean" had been his response.

The day it stopped being funny was the day that Roy, for the first time ever, knocked Marth down to the mat during practice. Marth had ignored the hand that Roy had offered to him, choosing instead to scramble to his feet and quickly leave the room.

"Well, he's always like that," the others said. "Probably upset that you made him look bad."

Roy swallowed down his pride and anger. Marth was untouchable. He had to let it go.

But a week later, Roy found his rival on the beach at sunset, tending to a bonfire. To Roy's surprise, Marth was wearing a modern suit. He was also pulling items from a pile and slowly feeding them to the flames.

He was burning his old clothes. And Roy knew what that meant.

Unable to ignore it, Roy approached the fire. "Congratulations," he said.

Marth looked up. There were tears in his eyes.

The ritual was an old one. Roy had seen it performed before. It signified major change in a person's life, a good change. Proud parents burned their children's old clothes when their kids graduated from school, for instance.

But Marth, kneeling before the fire, covered his eyes with his hands, and cried.

Roy took over the ceremony. It was bad luck to let the fire die out before the job was done. He picked up one article of clothing after another and tossed them into the pyre.

When there was nothing left, he took a seat next to Marth. They watched the flames burn, neither one speaking.

Roy suddenly realized that he would miss how Marth had looked in his traditional clothes. He had always looked good in them.

Because Marth wasn't saying anything, Roy started talking. He told Marth about the Altean-speaking aid workers he had met at the refugee camp when he was a kid. About the peacekeepers who taught him how to play cards, and the ex-soldiers who taught him how to stitch wounds. About the pregnant women who gave birth in open fields next to freshly slain corpses. About the kids who grew up out of those camps to become thieves or prostitutes or mercenaries. About his mother. All of his stories came back to his mother, somehow.

Outsiders who'd never seen the things he'd seen kept saying that he must have grown up too fast. But in his own mind, Roy hadn't been able to grow up fast enough. As a child, he'd only wanted to become stronger, to protect what was important to him. He'd never slowed down long enough to analyze what having a past like his meant, what his role in the world would be after the war, after their defeat. Only when he couldn't sleep at night did those thoughts surface and run circles in his head.

The sun had set by the time he finished. The bonfire grew small. Marth leaned against him, curled up tight against the onset of the night's chill.

Roy turned to him, to suggest that they get going before the last of the light was gone. But Marth leaned in and kissed him softly on the lips.

It was, all things considered, a rather chaste kiss.

There had always been something about Marth that had seemed "off." Roy had wondered about it in his idle moments, had wondered if Marth was "off" the same way Roy himself was "off." He'd first learned about human attraction through the sex workers he befriended at the camp. No one else had ever taught him about those types of things. There hadn't been time. He'd had to figure most of it out on his own.

Marth pulled away with a quiet apology, ducking his head, eyes downcast, as if he were expecting to get slapped.

Roy grabbed Marth's hand and pressed a kiss to the underside of his wrist, to the pulse beating there. Marth stared at him wide-eyed, as if he didn't dare smile or speak.

Roy didn't let go of his hand. "Remember me when you're on the winner's podium."

In the stillness that followed, the only sound was that of the rush of waves.

Before the fire died completely, the two fighters rose together. They left together.

They carried the scent of the ocean home with them.

Later, Roy looked around Marth's sparse dormitory, which had been cleared of all excess belongings, leaving only the bed, desk, chair, and a small lamp that the training school had provided. A single traveler's bag waited by the door, packed and ready.

The lamp gave off a very weak light. And in that half-dark, Roy almost tore off all of the buttons on Marth's brand new shirt. Beneath the ocean's salt, Marth smelled like clean laundry and expensive soap. The shirt still hung off of his right arm, like a defeated flag, when Roy pushed him down onto the mattress.

Roy was by no means an expert in love. He could only put up a front, pretend to be fearless, and plummet down into the abyss. Fire, teeth, and nothing promised. It was all he had.

And still, the travel bag and its owner were gone by morning - gone by taxi to catch an early flight that would carry him off to a new place, to a new life, the sort of life that they all fought for, sweated for, and bled for, but which very few attained. Left behind with the rest of the cheap furniture, the thing Roy remembered most about that summer was the warmth and its loss.

"Don't think of me when you're up there on the stage. You'll fail if you do."

Marth left him with those words in the locker room that day, less than an hour before the fight that would make him known. And the bitterness of the interrupted kiss lingered in Roy's mouth as he made his way down the corridor, past the plain white walls that fans and cameras never saw.

He had a lot riding on this fight. The last the world saw of him, he was falling from the stage, taken down by a hit that any student fresh from training camp would have taken without flinching. The audience had been so disappointed that they filled the arena with boos and jeers. No one knew that he was hemorrhaging on the inside at the time. No one knew what he had carried inside of himself for years.

It is said that when a lion takes over a pride, he first kills off the cubs of the previous king. Roy, illegitimate half-breed cub, was the unexpected survivor of such a cull.

A restlessness lay within his blood, like an electric wire, fully charged. Something was calling him now, a song from another place, another time. He felt it in his bones.

Roy hit the doors running.

The momentum carried him out into the bright spotlight, and with the sea of spectators roaring loud, he charged forward like an unchained dog. The bell rang, the fight began, and he knew then that he'd only ever lived for one thing - to break and to destroy, to draw the blood of others, to fight. It was the only thing in the world that could soothe the turmoil raging in his own heart.

Music. Loud bass. Champagne. A million ongoing conversations among a crush of bodies.

Roy shook hands and smiled for pictures, hugged complete strangers and repeated their names only to forget them a minute later. Everyone was acting like they knew him. He bought drinks for half the city, took a shot every time someone invited him to, and after a while, their words all just blurred together. He answered their questions without even hearing his own reply.

The only people he cared about at the moment were his old crew from the training school, who had flown out this way just to see him. He set them up with a luxury suite and paid for a driver and a private car to take them around town. He made sure their drinks always got refilled.

Mia threw both arms around his neck and kissed him hard on the cheek. Boyd kept high-fiving him in between shots before passing out on the couch. Falco called him a motherfucker several times and refused to drink anything except the most expensive tequila in the house.

That was his crew. He had to look out for them. The rest, he didn't much care for, but parties were business, and after-parties were serious business, and Roy needed to start networking. Didn't matter that he was still ringing in the head from the fight. Doc M said to take it easy and had prescribed a bottle of red and blue pills.

He managed to escape into the marble-tiled bathroom for a few minutes to splash cold water on his face. Then he swallowed three pills and chased them with rum and coke.

Roy straightened out his new suit and stepped out into the hallway. There, he almost tripped over a woman in a yellow dress throwing up into a potted plant. He recognized the man patting her back as Luigi, the world-famous record-holder of second-place wins. Roy thought about introducing himself, but the man seemed pre-occupied with the well-being of his date. So Roy just slipped off, stumbling as he tried to round the corner.

He stopped to press his forehead against the cool hard wall. He collected himself. Then he headed for the elevator.

When he got up, the room was trashed. His crew was passed out on the sofas, surrounded by empty bottles and shot glasses. The TV and the lights were still on.

Roy dimmed the lights and lowered the volume on the TV. He went to the window and opened the blinds. They were automatic, button-operated. Roy hadn't seen that type of thing before.

He scanned beyond the skyscrapers and the neon lights of downtown, where palm trees lined the streets. There was no ocean here, just the desert.

And then something hit him, a thought, something he had almost forgotten. He jerked upright, the weariness leaving his body in an instant.

He pulled his duffel bag out from underneath the table and left the room.

He went down to the bottom floor of the hotel, out to the pool area, looking for a quiet spot. But there were people everywhere.

In the lobby of the expensive shopping mall, which was closed for the night, he found the massive grand fountain, its spray turned off. Flashing lights from the strip reflected off the surface of the still water.

Someone was seated at the edge of it.

He still wore traditional clothes, it seemed. The cape was missing tonight though.

Marth stood up in one fluid motion. He offered Roy a faraway smile.

Roy shoved one hand into the pocket of his dress slacks. With the other he gripped the strap of the bag. "Hey," he said after a pause.

Marth held out a hand, silently beckoning. Confused, Roy reached out and took it in spite of himself.

Something about holding hands in public, even though they were alone, made him nervous. But Marth tugged him gently forward, toward a pair of towering doors.

They hadn't spoken since Marth was recruited into the pro league. Roy didn't know how things stood between them. The thought that Marth could have been waiting this whole time for Roy to join him in the ranks of the elite didn't seem likely.

They pushed through into another open courtyard. Crude yellow light touched the leaves of vines that grew along the walls. It took a second for Roy to realize that the light came from torches. In the center of the stone floor, a bonfire burned in a hearth.

Marth let go of his hand. He stopped in front of the fire.

Roy felt a faint smile twist his lips. "You know I almost forgot?"

Marth turned, hair slipping into his eyes. "How could you?"

Roy shrugged. "Got too excited, I guess. Everybody's been out to get a piece of me tonight. Almost forgot why I'm even doing all this."

Roy set down his bag and unzipped it.

"Let me help you."

"I got it." He pulled out an old shirt.

Marth watch him place each item from his past into the fire, his fingers coming dangerously close to the flames. Roy had no fear. Together, they watched it all burn away.

The smoke rose skyward, chasing embers on the ascent.

"You can't see the stars from out here, can you?"

"No." Marth looked down at the hearth. "The stars won't show themselves here."

"You think it's all worth it? I mean, it's gotta be. We made it this far." Roy laughed softly. In that moment, he could have soared with the smoke and embers, even if it was into an empty star-less sky. He burned his past for his mother. And the father he'd barely known. And for all the others they had lost. He needed to do something to let them know that he was alive, that things would be better from now on. There'd be money for a better life now. He'd get that car and house that he'd always said he would get when he was a kid. He'd start a proper school to carry on the family arts so that the tradition wouldn't die. Maybe set up a fund for war orphans, and build a monument for the veterans.

He could do that now. He had money now for all of that.

"Congratulations," Marth said in a voice that was all but a whisper.

Roy caught him by the arms and pulled him close, taking him by surprise for the second time.

"You too, huh, Marth? You're the same as me, aren't you?"

Marth stared at him. Then he came in closer and let his lips graze the outer curve of Roy's ear. He whispered, "I am the king's sacrifice. My life belongs to the kingdom."

"Your life belongs to you."

Slowly, Marth slid his arms across the back of Roy's shoulders, burying his face in his friend's neck.

"I wish that were true."

Roy tightened the hold he had around Marth's waist, recalled the warmth he'd held briefly for a night the summer before. Not a memory now, but something real, a pulse pounding hard in his arms.

Then he looked straight up at the sky. That dark sky where stars refused to shine.

Hey, mom, you were right. Your bastard son is still here...

Still alive, after all this time...

Ain't nobody leavin', nobody goin' home
Even if they turn the lights out, the show is goin' on