User:SilverCrono/TL/2

Fire.

All that Aaron Tsidaal could remember was fire. And blood. He had been sitting in the cargo bay of the recovery ship for mere minutes, but already he found that he couldn't remember much of what had happened to him. Perhaps more accurately, he found that he didn't want to remember. When he closed his eyes, all he saw was Jeison's cold and wounded face, his dying eyes. All he heard was the crackling of the fire and the collapse of wood onto flesh and the screams of victims. At first he had felt only pain but now it was replaced by a cold numbness. He didn't know if the pain was from a burn he had received or an injury or from what he had to witness.

He knew for a fact that something had gone very wrong in the Tsidaal colony. From the window of the flying ship, the sky was still painted red with the blood of the dying? and fighting had erupted in the dirty, ruined city that the ship flew over. Not only were people running and fighting in the burning metropolis, huge giant robots were recklessly destroying the area and even fighting each other. They were of different models but all of them, every single one, held some weapon and took a life. In that instant Aaron knew that his world was changed forever. "Why is this happening? Jeison... What did we do? Why did we do this?"

A rough hand grabbed Aaron's shoulder and aggressively pulled him aside. Before, Aaron was standing and staring into a wall, eyes empty and frozen, but now he found himself facing an angry man wearing what appeared to be a pilot suit. It was all white and slim-fitting and a helmet was attached to its hip. Without mincing words, the man shoved a copy of the suit into Aaron's hands and shoved him towards a large crowd that congregated at the back of the ship's hangar.

"Hurry up and get your compression suit on, boy, or you could get hurt out here! Come on and get your ass over to the rest of the processed ones, you raggedy bastard." The man, obviously agitated and focused on something else, spoke to Aaron with an angry tone. Aaron numbly followed the directions and stumbled into the suit as he staggered towards the large amount of people. Although at first loose and fitting well over his burnt skin, the suit quickly pressurized air around him and loosened itself to his body frame upon being fully zipped. It awkwardly gripped around his crotch, something that would have proved embarrassing and annoying in a different situation, perhaps.

Aaron felt even more sorrow as he found himself standing as one of the sparse crowd. The people standing were people like him, wounded and scarred, eyes wide but seeing nothing but their pain. There were two people who were standing almost untouched, two people whose brightness and very life essence stood out from the desolate stampede around them. Aaron recognized both a tall male in glasses and the girl he ran into earlier, the one with bright orange hair.

It took a long while for Aaron to realize he was angry. The numbness gradually and slowly became tainted as if it were pure white paper being crushed by the fist of paroxysm. Not only was the bitch from earlier in attendance and completely unharmed, the tall boy next to her wore glasses. That's not fucking right, Aaron told himself. ''Jeison wore glasses. No one else.'' Unlike the girl next to him, who at least wore dirty rags, the bespectacled boy was outfitted in a sparkling white and golden uniform-esque outfit that seemed to defiantly shun the drab and muddy palettes that the rest of the refugees were forced to wear day in and day out. ''He's not one of us. He's a fucking outsider and he gets to live and only Jeison wore glasses!''

At that moment Aaron began to feel extreme hatred. Not just for the girl, not just for the bespectacled boy, but for everyone and everything, including himself. His fists dug ever tighter until his long nails broke his skin and blood ran down his hand onto the cold metal floor beneath him. Soldiers not unlike the man who jostled Aaron earlier were pushing through the crowd and distributing similar compression suits, but Aaron could not move even when one of them pushed into him. He stared at the ground with fierce intensity, so overcome with rage that he could not even force himself to budge. It was then that he realized the boy with glasses was talking.

"We cannot let ourselves lose hope! This is our land, this is our colony!" An explosion rang from far off and the ship shuddered. The boy's voice did not falter but instead grew ever louder. "Those we loved may have been defeated and killed, but we cannot let that hinder us in the slightest! Don't let the wounded and the pained drag you down!" That was the last straw. Something inside of Aaron snapped, and he looked up with ferocious gumption. Now he began to push his way through the crowd, mobilizing to the boy in the glasses. His fists clenched even tighter. "Our souls cannot be allowed to be pulled down by the gravity of those who sacrificed for us! Now, do you agr- ah!"

The boy's speech was interrupted by Aaron's fists making contact with his face. The crowd's attention was drawn and the soldiers stopped their rounds but no action was taken otherwise. Aaron stood in place and looked down on the boy, who quickly fell to the ground and lost his glasses, with contempt. He held a hand to his nose, sucking his teeth when it came back dripping blood, and probed around the ground for his glasses.

"What the hell is wrong with you?! Can't you see I'm trying to unite our peop-Gragh!" Once again the boy lost his train of speech, this time because Aaron kicked him straight in his face. Now the boy's nose was bleeding profusely. "Agh! You fucking bastard!"

"Alright, kid, that's enough..." A man, taller than Aaron but not much bulkier, gripped his shoulder and tried to pull him away from the boy who was now rolling around on the floor in pain. Now that most of the people around the area were wearing compression suits, it was impossible to tell if he was a refugee or a crew member of the ship, but Aaron shoved him away all the same.

"You shut up and stay back there! I don't need some adult telling me when I'm finished!" The man backed up as commanded, stunned at Aaron's aggressive words, and Aaron turned and glared once more at the groveling boy beneath him. He spit on the boy's back and stomped on the glasses that were on the ground near his feet. "If anything, tell this little piece of shit that's he's had enough! You're not one of us, you shitstain! Just fucking die, you asshole! I hate people like you, bitch!" Aaron, in his haste to insult, began sprinkling swears in Draconian as he started to kick around the boy again.

After a moment, the boy lay on his back, various bruises around his body and his impeccable clothes now dirtied and wrinkled. The both of them, the crowd at large even, fought to catch their breath. Outside, the war for Tsidaal continued, as did the death and destruction and fire. To Aaron, the fire was the worst part. It burned away all of his anger but left him with empty hatred and regrets.

The boy spoke again, surprisingly still using his loud volume and self-assured tone. It cut through to Aaron and forced him to open up his fists for the first time. "You don't know anything about me, you dirty refugee barbarian." The boy had a sharp accent that was nothing like anything Aaron had heard frequently before and especially didn't stink of the crude Draconian syntax. "If you don't like what I'm doing, get off this ship and go die with the rest of your dirt. We're trying to live still, here."

Suddenly it had returned, all of Aaron's enthusiasm and muscle-tightening frustration, and he became too wired to actually attack the boy again. Instead he reached down and gripped the boy's shirt, pulling him up and growling audibly in his face. What agitated him further was the fact that the boy refused to even look into Aaron's eyes or change that stoic frown that he now wore on his bruised and bloody face. "You are NOTHING like us! Just look at yourself, you fucking aristocratic scum! I HATE people like you!" He breathed into the boy's face, slim and clean without the glasses to grace them, and Aaron felt himself tearing up. The anger dissolved and morphed into physically painful, gripping sorrow, but the hatred still remained. He wondered if it would ever leave. "You're not..." He choked back a sob and resented himself for it. "You're not allowed to wear those glasses! Those were... That was for Jeison! I was going to buy him a pair... We were going to get food and get money and he'd get new glasses and we'd be gentlemen again...!"

The crowd was silent and emphatic as Aaron lost himself to his tears. Nobody moved, each afraid to break up the quiet racking of his tears and bring back his destructive violence. They all felt his pain, somewhere in their vagrant and expatriate hearts, except for the boy. But now, exposed to the ethereal pain and staring at it as if it were some new, wild beast to be marveled at, the boy looked at Aaron's clenched eyes with curiosity.

Another rumble rang through the ship, followed by a sharp shock through the ground and an exrutiatingly loud noise. Some of the refugees, remembering the catastrophe they barely lived through before, instinctively cried out and ducked upon the the close explosion. The very air around the hull seemed to disappear and the ground began slanted as the ship began to fall out of the sky.

****