User:SilverCrono/TL/1

"That one was flying pretty low, don't you think?"

Jeison Tsidaal looked up to the sky with his mouth slightly ajar and eyes wide open as he shuffled along the fenced path. Aaron disregarded his murmurings and shoved his hands in the pockets of his tight rags. He didn't like the look, but they were years old and were now more capri-length than pants. Not that it mattered to him all that much. They served their purpose.

"From the looks of it, I'd say it was an outlaw ship. The Nitorius vessels don't look nearly that beat-up..." Jeison now looked down to the ground as he walked along with Aaron. His outfit was slightly better fitting him than Aaron's was, but no less raggedy and washed out. Such was the wardrobe of a refugee in these times.

Aaron sucked his teeth and nudged Jeison roughly as he noticed an older man, gray and uneven beard down to his chest, glance back at the two with untrusting eyes. "Shut your mouth about those outlaws already, would ya? Or at least talk in something other than Common, you idiot," Aaron growled at his companion. Outlaws weren't the most popular subject in this corner of the galaxy, especially not on the Tsidaal colony. After the market crash in 00843 and the subsequent collapse of government on Neptune, the surrounding colonies - of which Tsidaal was one - had been subject to rampant anarchy and chaos. ''The Age of Treachery Dawns was all Aaron could think of when he thought of this subject. The title had come from a newspaper he glimpsed in a guard's quarter on the way to their shelter (not that anyone knew he could read'').

A girl bumped past Aaron and he looked after her with barely hidden irritation. She didn't even bother to look back at him, instead focusing on jostling her way through the heavy queue for the monthly shelter find. Orthodox dirty rags covered her slim frame, but bright orange hair bumped out of a too-large hat she held on her head. He couldn't help but look after her eye-drawing locks as she disappeared into the brown crowd. Beside him, Jeison chuckled.

"Found yourself another girl, my brother?" Now, of all times, Jeison spoke in Draconian, an obscure Saturnian language. Aaron looked down and scoffed.

"No way. Just some bitch who doesn't have the courtesy to apologize after she bumps into a gentleman." Aaron spat out the word "bitch" in Draconian scorn, letting his throat erupt the guttural sound with unmasked anger. Now people looked at the two again, but without understanding, probably.

Jeison's malnourished body racked with his laughter. "Right, we're gentleman!" He looked at Aaron with simple happiness in his eyes and involuntarily poked at the top of his nose before he glanced at his hand and dropped it. He had worn glasses for years, but they broke at the last checkpoint. He still wasn't used to not having to push them up. "Gentlemen who're going to get us some great grub. Can you believe we just happened to be in town when the Nitorius family is doing their annual slum furnishing?! It's going to be a feast!" He would have spread his arms into the air and spun if the two were surrounded by a crowded line of men, women, children, and sick miscellaneous.

Aaron let himself chuckle at Jeison's naivete. Stoic as he might be, it was hard to dispute their luck for such an event. "Maybe I'll see that girl again. With some royal food in my belly, it'd take two seconds flat to teach her a lesson." Jeison glanced at his friend, slightly frightened.

"Just...don't let it get as serious as last time, alright, man? We almost didn't make it out of that station. You...You know how I feel about prison, man..." People had died last time. Jeison still dreamed of their blood on his shoes sometimes. Aaron looked off into the distance for a second, staring and glaring at nothing, before he looked down and let himself calm down.

"Yeah...of course."

The ensuing walk transitioned back to unflinching silence as the two marched ever closer to the Nitorius mansion. Dilapidated and outdated as it might have been, it still stood as a tower of wealth to the hundreds of refugees. The existing Nitorius regime was one of paradoxical poverty and riches; the only provisional control of Tsidaal state, it was no doubt prosperous from the taxes and support of the Tsidaalian people. In the same vein, being rich in Tsidaal was so out of touch with the cosmic economy that it was just an ascended form of homelessness.

The two young men were close to the gate of the mansion, where people were being let in to the royal feast, when Aaron pulled back the sleeve of his shirt and glanced at his number. "09974". For as long as he could remember, that five-number string has been on the underside of his wrist, making him a statistic. Everyone he knew had their number, all war refugees and homeless had to, but the very prospect of having one filled him with a swell of indignation even to this day. Who decided what number he had? Why did it have to be permanently branded?

Jeison tugged at Aaron's other sleeve. "It's back, the outlaw ship!" He at least had the decency to speak Draconian this time. "But, look, it's lower than before... And it's flying the opposite way." The ship was indeed extremely low, and every refugee in the area looked up at the sky as it loomed ever closer. For some reason Aaron was filled with dread. He noticed that the soldiers at the gate of the mansion had ran inside of it.

"Uh... Look, Jeison, maybe we should get out of here." Jeison didn't look down and his expression soured. He began to mutter something, but Aaron couldn't hear him in the rising volume of the refugees. "Jeison...?" His friend looked down into Aaron's eyes and projected fear.

"Aaron... Why are its hatches opening? What did it just drop?" Aaron looked up and felt his insides drop to the floor as a gigantic cylinder drop from the underside of the large ship. The cartridge, easily as large as a bus transport, was on a direct course to hit the mansion as the ship zoomed past the crowd and opposite the mile-long queue line. Jeison sniffled. "Aaron, what's going to hap-"

The ground shook and an explosion knocked Aaron off his feet. He felt himself slip in and out of consciousness. Between fits of consciousness he tried to speak but found himself breathless. Pain froze his muscles and reduced him to crawling and passing out. Something, somewhere, was filling him with unbearable pain, but the worst was the terrible headache he suffered. It was hard for him to even think straight. But besides his pain, what he could think of filled him with fearful adrenaline - Jeison.

He cried out to him with slurred words and barely moving lips. From what Aaron could see, whatever that ship dropped was devastating. Most of the people who were standing in line were now dead or buried under the debris from the mansion. In the distance, AUs from the skyport were beginning to litter the sky, and beam shots lit up the waning sun. The light was too much for Aaron's eyes and he closed them, but he still couldn't understand exactly what had happened. Was it a bomb, he thought to himself. And then - Jeison! His cries for his companion grew rather frantic until they received an answer.

A familiar moan called for Aaron's attention a few meters ahead. Aaron began to cry and crawled forward through a mound of corpses. Blood was everywhere and it disgusted him. Finally he came to Jeison's body and felt bile rising in his throat. Now he found that he could speak again. "Jeison, no, please, what happened? No!" He spoke in frantic switches between Draconic and Common, guttural and phonetic speech accented with coughs and sobs. "Please!"

Everything below Jeison Tsidaal's chest was crushed by a thick degree of rubble, and the rest of him suffered severe burns. He looked at Aaron with almost unseeing eyes. The blood from beneath the wreck began to wet Aaron's knees as Jeison opened his mouth. Blood cascaded down his chin. The now crimson red lips moved, but no sound escaped. Aaron managed to read his meaning as Jeison's eyes lazily flit towards the skyport.

"You...You want me to leave?" Aaron winced in pain as he nervously spoke. He wanted to help his friend, but his hands simply hovered over the obviously doomed and mangled body. How could this have happened? "No... I can't leave you! We're..." There was almost no composure to Aaron now. The moanings and screams that had created a soundtrack of cacophony in the area only served to alienate him more. "We were supposed to be gentlemen for life, Jeison! No matter what... We stuck together! You can't do this to me!!" He ran his hands through his hair, only to wince as he found most of it to be burned off and caked with dried blood.

Another moan caught his attention, and Aaron looked back down at his friend. His eyes were glued to the now red sky as fires took over the atmosphere. His mouth opened one last time, and no blood came out this time. Aaron was frozen as he watched his friend speak with the last breath left in his crushed lungs. "You can't keep living like this, my brother." With his last words said, Jeison's head fell back on the concrete and froze up in horror at the burning sky. Aaron's tears met and mixed with Jeison's blood.

Absentmindedly, Aaron stood up and looked down at Jeison's crushed body as a cruiser recovery ship landed in the distance. Scantly armored rescue helpers began to dig through the wreckage and deaths. Aaron looked around, searching, but found nothing but destruction and the ruin of the mansion. There was nothing left of the area but despair and fire. He kept looking and crying as he was roughly taken by disaster responsemen. His clothes, he noticed, were burned off, but he was still freezing cold. "I'm looking, Jeison, but I don't, I can't find it, why did you leave?! I can't find it...I can't find it..."