Blue Lamentation Chapter 4

Start the next chapter! Ok. ......sorry...little bit of collaborative typing going on here... *glares at Michelle* A/N: For some reason the text is switching between formatted and not. I'm not sure what exactly ff.n is trying to do...*twitch*...but incase the formatting isn't working this time, everything in this chapter is italicized, meaning it's a flashback... --------------------------------------------------

Sand dunes, manholes, wind...

Sounds of gunshots are heard. Men run with their heads bowing in the wind, their tunics fluttering violently behind them. Bodies can be seen here and there; some dead, some merely on their way to death.

Once one man was separated from the group there was no finding him. Sending a search party would only mean loosing that many more men. They all stuck together through that hell. They were all comrades.

Despite the reason for being on that planet, that wasteland they called Titan, it felt like the place he always belonged in. It felt like he had lived there forever, like it was home.

They had just come back to base from another bloody battle. The soldiers lay in the trench doing various things...writing home, playing cards, having a drink. A young man not out of his twenties with sapphire hair and eyes leaned against the wall of the trench. He pulled a cigarette out of his tunic and lit it up, shielding it from the wind with his hand. He sat there taking casual draws on the cigarette, thinking about nothing in particular.

A clunky little melody invaded his thoughts. It was simple, like something churned out of a performing monkey's crank box. But somehow it carried a host of emotions with it. Each little note played by the music box told a tale. Some of regret, some of sorrow, some of happiness, and some of friendship.

The young man stood up and went to sit by the man with the sterling box.

"Nice tune. Mind if I play it on my sax when we get back home?"

He ventured to ask the question. The man with the box had silvery hair and looked rugged and beaten. He stared at the young man for a minute, and then handed the music box over to him without a word.

The young man stared at the other for a moment. Promptly the silver haired man stood up and began to walk away.

Within an instant he turned on him with a knife drawn. Like a flash he drove it into the wall of the trench, just centimeters away from the young man's head. The young man glanced to the right of his head, to see what the other man's knife had struck. There, the writhing body of a large black scorpion laid twitching and teetering between the brink of life and death. It fell away, in two pieces, and the young man breathed a heavy sigh of relief.

The other man flicked his knife back into its holster and walked away, again in silence.

The young man on the ground stared at the others back for a moment, the winded up the little box and listened to the sweet melody again. But this time he could hear another note of emotion in the song, and this one was his own.

-------------------------------------------------- I'm really sorry! That was such a cop-out chapter...I promise the next one will actually have some substance.