Shattered: Chapter Four
A/N: Gosh, it's been a while...well, if anyone actually reads this thing anymore, here's chapter four. I guess you could deduce that much. Thanx to TailsEponineRox for telling me some information about the final scene, though someone else told me that John and the Engineer were there...so I decided to put them into to make this longer. :3Hey, if any of you actually end up reading this, please review, and constructive criticism would be nice...but I'm not going to beg. ;)
Shattered- Chapter Four
"How in one night have we come so…far?" the girl whispers. I've been struck immediately with a deep wrenching sorrow- not for myself, for I hardly knew her at all, but for Kim and Chris and Tam, and Ellen, who is watching as disparately as I am, but watching Chris and looking betrayed.
Just observing what's going on in front of me is terribly awkward, and has the distinct, sour feeling of being just plain wrong. I feel like I'm watching someone performing a holy ritual, not meant for my eyes. Chris, on the other hand, is too blinded by grief to pick up on the tension surrounding us like a suffocating heat; if Kim notices our gawking she doesn't acknowledge so; her boy, Tam, is gazing at his young mother, her dress bloodstained and her face profound, with a disturbed, scared look in his dark brown eyes.
The greasy little man they call simply 'the engineer', however, doesn't look perturbed or even grief-stricken; his brow is furrowed in an unreadable, unfathomable expression and he doesn't pay attention to anyone until Ellen tries to take Tam in her arms. He looks almost angry and pulls the boy back; but why? What ties does he have? Supposedly this girl was only another whore to him, Chris has told me, and her child- certainly nothing more than the bui-doi, lower than dust.
Kim is slipping away from life, I can tell, and I can't stand to watch this heart-wrenching event any longer. Pulling my eyes away, a sudden cathartic feeling washes over me with a deep sense of longing and regret; why couldn't I have known her better, helped her more, seen her again, eyes sparkling as they did when I told her that Chris was here. The feeling that told me that I had to help Chris find her, the feeling that told me I had to tell people about what was happening to those children, our children, in Vietnam after we left. A feeling partly of guilt and partly of empathy.
Sure, I didn't believe Chris three years ago when he spoke about her innocence and purity, and didn't understand the magnetic pull that attracted him to this seventeen-year-old. Admittedly, she was lovely. But as wonderful as he claimed? I couldn't realise that, never having loved anyone so dearly myself. But it's plain to see all along that she was something more mysterious and breath-taking than I thought. And how could one person so easily end their life to begin another person's- what with so little hesitation?
If only any of us understood.