@creepyflock asked: “When did you unfold, slowly turn cold, and finalize your soul?" bevin x syd “
OH SO QUIET |
The news about Neitera came steadily as any new topic for the media to mull over. He heard about the initial discovery between sheets of song lyrics written on the back of old contracts and junk mail. Maya was in the other room cooking dinner, placing steaming rice in porcelain bowls and cooked vegetables. She sauntered barefoot, opening and closing all the cabinets in the kitchen as if it weren’t her own house. Since Syd moved to Los Angeles and bid much of his time alone he had promised his sister Friday night dinners is where he’d show up, where he’d be around people who knew him.
He made sure to put barriers around him since Hawaii, and years later those barriers were kept. He focused on his music more than anything because it was easy to get lost in it and it was even harder to be betrayed by it. And in any case it was around the time where people needed to hear his music, where the message of love and heartbreak and contemporary vocalization about the harmonic yet ironic tales of the Iliad pressed into any eardrums that would listen. Where sold out bars and concert halls all rang with the sting of notes as his fingers pressed against frets and strings and the honey of his voice echoed and echoed far out the halls and the bar nights, his voice swam up into the ether and landed among light and distant time, somewhere unreachable-- in a sense he was still talking still expressing himself just now, to anyone that listened.
Neitera, a planet some ways far across the universe past our milky way and into another explosion of stars. The grainy picture of the planet flickered in the television, back and forth between reports and NASA scientists, astronomers and old astronauts, politicians--of course politicians. Maya handed him his bowl of rice and picked up the remote and upped the volume.
Life they said, they found life on a tucked away planet.
Neitera happened, then soon after so did the war.
War is oddly quiet, even in the midst of bombs being dropped, shots fired, the heavy beat of military and militia all alike geared in dark suits of armor marching in valor than any other reason because in war you eventually stop asking questions. In their march it’s silent in its lack of redemption or it’s a necessity and it’s always a necessity.
Yet, you would think you wouldn’t have time to listen. But, everyone has their own record playing in their heads. At night, Syd dressed in his own dark armor of the militia sits watch and ponders this with his index finger steadily tapping the trigger of an A10, he gazes with his weak eyes upon what he thinks to be the planet Neitera which has come so far since it's debut to Earth, but he can also hear it too.
Its hum it’s melody a shift of space millions of miles away where there’s supposedly a war there too. And he childishly wonders if the planet has oceans as there is on Earth, if there’s still music, if there is anything to drown out the noise and the quiet of war.
Six Days Later 08:15AM
The raid to kill temple militia leaders was an easy feat for the US Government. They had knocked off seven already but Syd though not a soldier at heart was tactile and trust worthy enough to lead a small guerrilla group to ambush a fort with the delegates that left their state bare boned, it’s people starving or dead, it’s water polluted and undrinkable.
Of course, he was there to tear it all down, at least a piece of it. Those were their reasons and he needed no other questions to further accept the task. They would all die from both sides-- he had made peace with that.
These delegates were top military men, commanders, admirals but it was good enough to get the message good enough for him to be heard. The Earth was full of these messages of sacrilege , blood and bombs, what more was another?
Two of his men had already been shot but four of them had gotten the bombs placed right in the middle of what seemed to be a ceremony of something important happening in a college football field. Perhaps new recruits to uphold the new regime. Syd had his orders and his plans; it didn’t matter what they were celebrating, not while hundreds of people were dying. He was west of the open field high above the bleachers so far high he had a birds eye view of everything. He looked into the eye of his telescope, gearing to shoot at any man. The dashed markers on the telescope locked on to the profile of a recruit. They wore their own dark suit indicating their loyalty to the guard. He shouldered the A10 and aimed it at the face of a woman.
Her green eyes were not aware of him but he was aware of her. It was the moment that he would remember that he had seen these eyes before. Back when all he wanted to care about was music and his family and bowls of steamed rice.It was so loud then.
Now it was quiet. It was different, it was a whole other world where he had not looked upon her green eyes or kissed her peaked lips with an embedded scar on the upper fold, or held her hand or made love to her and she to him, or laughed with her and cried with her or sat with her or been angry at her or hurt or she at him. Now, will he shoot?
He doesn't mean to say her name, perhaps it is said as answer to the question at hand. His trigger finger is steady. In the eye of the telescope he see's her looking up at him in his direction as if she's heard him from such a distance as he stands highest above all in the field.
If he doesn't shoot now, someone else will soon. Syd inhales deep cold air in his lungs and pulls the trigger, what else could he do? There wasn’t much else left to say.
