[Ace&Peter] The Sound of Silence (4)
"So... you guys don't have Twinkies or something?" Peter pushed the apple back, like he was brushing off some pushy salesman. "I'm not hungry, so... I was thinking just a couple bites of something'll do."
Ace rolled his eyes, unamused, the corners of his black-painted mouth tugging down.
"...There are no Twinkies here, Peter. And I don't think that'd do you any good."
"Hey, don't go assuming what I should eat, alright?" Peter pursed his lips, puffing out his chest in bluff and bluster. "I know I look like an old geezer, but I can still eat like I'm twenty."
"Yeah, yeah, diabetes is great for you." Ace's mouth was sharp, but his hand stubbornly shoved that apple right back at him. "Eat some damn fruit."
Peter didn't refuse this time. He stuffed the apple into his jacket pocket and trudged along behind Ace, his eyes scanning every passerby they encountered with open wariness.
They kept making their way down the grassy slope. Peter's gaze kept slipping past Ace's shoulder, sizing up every Jendellian who crossed their path. To be fair, Ace hadn't lied—Jendellians looked pretty damn close to Earthlings. Two arms, two legs, two eyes and a mouth. The only thing was, every Jendellian had a distinct facial feature, what you'd call their "makeup." But it wasn't painted on with cosmetics—it was more like a unique biological trait, like fingerprints on Earth. Same way, Peter saw plenty of men, women, even little kids—but not a single old person. The whole ecosystem had this paralyzed kind of cheerfulness to it.
When they passed through a stretch of low-lying wasteland, both of them stopped dead in their tracks without saying a word.
A wooden coffin, not yet closed, sat right in the middle. The earth had that freshly dug smell—damp, raw, pungent—like a wide-open mouth, waiting in silence for a soul to feed it. A few Jendellians stood around it. No crying, just a dead-water stillness.
Peter had half a mind to crack some crude joke, break up the suffocating air, but when he turned his head, the look on Ace's face made him swallow it right back down.
Ace's head was tilted just slightly, lips parted, eyes fixed dead on that coffin. His gaze was too deep, too faraway. There wasn't the fear of death Peter expected—it was more like something tangled up with reverence, almost a feverish kind of longing.
Peter called his name, his voice rough.
Ace's eyes rolled slowly over, like it took him a good while to come back. And the moment their gazes collided, Ace's face looked like something had struck it.
A strange expression flickered across his features—first the embarrassment of getting caught, then bitterness. That bitterness spread from the corner of his mouth, slow, like a stone dropped into water, the ripples reaching every inch of his face.
"Let's go." He twisted his head away stiffly. His boots made a sticky little sound against the ground.
Peter cast a brief glance toward the coffin and finally asked the question he'd been trying so hard to ignore. "Where exactly are we going?"
"Do you wanna go back now?" Ace turned around slowly, no trace of surprise on his face. "If you go back, you can never come here again."
"Me? I'm not..." Peter shot back, confused, his brow furrowing. "What about you? Aren't you coming with me?"
Ace opened his mouth. His voice thinned out in the wind, barely catchable. "I'm not there anymore, Peter." His long black hair was yanked by the wind, covering his face.
The blood in Peter's veins slowed. He'd just gotten the answer he never wanted. He turned to look back at the graveyard. The outline of that coffin was stretching, growing larger. The silent crowd around it started to blur, to fade. Some irresistible gravitational pull dragged his gaze, forcing him step by step closer, until his eyes inevitably crossed the edge of the coffin and he looked straight down into its depths—
Ace's voice timed it perfectly. Like a blade, it sliced right through that suffocating pull.
Peter jolted back to his senses. He found himself slumped on the grass, drenched in cold sweat like he'd just been yanked out of water, his chest heaving, gulping down air. No coffin. No droning hum. Just the purple sky and the young man standing before him.
"...Where are you going, Ace?"
Peter climbed to his feet, trembling. That grim premonition in his gut had swelled into a mountain, pressing down heavy at the back of his throat. If Peter had spent his whole life following beast-like instincts, then this time—God, please, let his instincts be wrong for once.
"You remember that disaster I mentioned earlier?" Ace slowly lifted his head. The silver glam powder shimmered with an unreal glow under the purple sky. "My people are dying, Peter. Jendellians are supposed to evolve, not rot like this... This planet is withering away. She... she needs me."
Peter shook his head in disbelief, his lashes fluttering uncontrollably. "Then... then what? After you save your goddamn planet, you can come back, right? Jeanette, Monique... they're still waiting outside that hospital room!"
"No, Peter." Ace looked at him, his eyes clear almost to the point of cruelty. "I might not make it back this time."
"WHY?!" Peter completely broke. He lunged forward, his thick fingers clamping onto the sleeve of Ace's leather top, his nails practically digging into the hide. "Tell me what the hell is going on?!"
Ace looked at Peter's face, trying to explain. Fragmented thoughts, like overloaded electrical currents, flickered in those young eyes. But in the end, nothing came out.
"Let's just go back, brother..." Peter tightened his grip on Ace's arm, his voice softening, carrying a plea he didn't even notice himself. "We'll find the best doctors. Look, medical science is so damn advanced these days—"
"You—! You don't get it, Peter..." Ace shoved him away, blurting out, half-embarrassed and half-furious. "I have to go!"
"Then why does it have to be you?! Without you, would Jendell just stop spinning?!"
Ace realized he had zero shot at out-logicking this Earthling. So, just like all those fights in the backstage rehearsal room decades ago, he resorted to pure, bullheaded petulance. "That's all just what YOU think! Have you ever actually thought about what I want?!"
Peter was instantly speechless. He looked at this twenty-something Space Ace, in his absolute prime, then thought back to that sallow, ashen body in the real world, lying at the center of all those tubes. In this near-death world that belonged to Ace, the guy had even been stripped of the right to die of old age.
After a long, agonizing struggle, Peter dropped his hands in defeat, his fists balling against his pant legs. "Then... take me with you."
They kept walking. Ace led him through those colorful low-rise houses and finally stopped in front of a towering white pillar-like structure.
"Your... church or something?" Peter craned his neck up, the bones in there voicing their protests once again.
It was a church—more precisely, a pillar-like building, pure white from top to bottom, soaring straight up into the sky. The smooth white exterior had no carvings of any kind, just sheer surface shooting straight toward the heavens.
"I swear I've never seen a church shaped like this in my whole damn life." Peter's neck was getting sore from looking up too long. "How the hell did they even build this thing?"
Ace shook his head and answered, honest as could be. "No idea."
"A church this tall—wouldn't the top of it practically scrape the sky?" Peter squinted his cloudy old eyes. "Don't you guys have ladders or something? What do you see if you go up there?"
"We're not allowed to climb high."
Ace gazed at the massive white tower, a strange kind of reverence seeping into his eyes. "Jendellians have an inborn condition called Jendellusion. The moment we get too high off the ground, our gravity goes haywire, our neurons instantly overload, and then we fall into a permanent coma. It's extremely dangerous."
Peter let out a loud snort, one of his sparse eyebrows shooting up. "Really? Come on, spaceman. Back when we were doing concerts, you were up on that rising platform above the stage doing guitar solos all the damn time. How come you never passed out then?"
Ace finally turned his face toward Peter. The wind lifted his long black hair. His eyes shone bright like nighttime stars.
"Yeah. That was Earth. Different gravity system." He winked at Peter, carrying the slyness of a prank well played. "Besides... on Earth, I found a way to keep myself stable at high altitudes."
Something clicked in Peter's head. He rubbed his forehead in despair. "Goddammit, don't you tell me it's that stuff again..."
"I told you before, alcohol keeps me steady, Peter!" Ace giggled, like a kid who'd finally gotten to show off his secret to a grown-up.
"Bullshit!" Peter hollered, his voice echoing between the white pillars. But somewhere along the way, his tense shoulders had eased up without him noticing.
Eventually, the ruckus died down. That low hum in the air seemed to buzz faintly once again.
Peter clicked his tongue, muttering to himself with something close to resignation. "Alright. Well, at least that explains why you aliens all live in squat little houses."
Ace didn't respond. He slowly lifted his head, gazing up once more at the impossibly tall, stark-white pillar of a church. Against the violet skylight, his profile looked a little thin.
"I've dreamed about climbing up there just once."
Peter looked at the stardust glinting in the corners of Ace's eyes. "Alright. Even if you somehow lucked out and didn't pass out—say you made it to the top. What would you even do up there?"
Ace gave it some serious thought, then tilted his head. "Dunno. If I didn't fall off, I guess I'd just... check out the view for a while."
"...And then," Ace's voice suddenly dropped real soft, and a sly grin spread across his face as he added, "I'd kick the ladder down. Build my own little kingdom up on that roof, and never come back down! "
At that, he cracked himself up over his own ridiculous idea, doubling over with laughter. Peter just stood there, gripping the collar of his jacket tight, watching the hem of Ace's clothes flutter lighter and lighter in the wind, saying nothing.
