(c) We Shouldn't Settle For This

PG-13, I guess.
Inspired by...nearly absolutely nothing, I guess. Written yesterday in religion, and today during bio/English/just now.
Copyrighted 2008 - as in I own this all. All rights reserved.
PM me for explanations if you want. Or just ask. I'd like to make you...think, at least. idk.
First story here ^.^. First story in...nearly four months.

**

It was, in truth, a beautiful place.
But then again, raw beauty is up for opinion so often that maybe the most beautiful thing about this place was that it wasn’t beautiful at all. The landscape was harsh, rock, barren even. The hills that sloped down towards cliffs, giving way to the ocean below, they were green at least in the spring. By the harsh summers, they were often reddish yellow, brown mounds of dirt that just seemed so terribly useless. Yet by the fall, they were ravaged by natural forest fires again and again with each passing year—their charred black remains giving way to new green life and readying this routine cycle for years upon years. And the land here stayed still for those years, as the changes that needed to be made never seemed to happen until they already had and there was a new change waiting to be made. But if the dirt could have talked, the earth would have told you it was happy, pure, it only really knew this blissful quiet peace.

Of course, then came the people. And at first the earth saw the people as equals, beings who gave back what they took and walked softly across the earth’s skin, treating their gracious host with respect and care. But this symbiosis of cultures did not last long and soon the people began to forsake their earth. They began to stamp on the ground and leave small bruises and scars, and they shed blood on the dirt. The people began replacing water with concret, building their walls and their cities, separating themselves from the roots they had once placed so firmly in the hands of their beautiful wilderness.

And the earth cried out, but no one heard. And the people just silenced it more and more. It could feel itself being suffocated, shut away in its very own skin, these parasites crawled across its surface like they owned it. And so the earth gave its beauty to the stars and began to die, watching as its hills slumped and even those stars it had given away all the splendor it possessed too, disappeared behind greybrown clouds of polluted chemicals.

As the earth gave up, the people on its surface did too. With every passing day the hills slumped farther into their barren ugliness, the governments drove themselves insane. Violent takeover, incessant bloodshed. For generations, it was all the people knew, until finally it faded—but along with it did all the mention of what a beautiful place the world had once been. And so many ideas that once defined the world as a place worth saving seemed to disappear with the beauty and the stars.

It was in a country that might have once had a name worth remembering, that two boys were born. Except for all they knew, they might as well have been girls, birds or aliens. They were children, with cherubic round faces and pudgy little wrists. Their smiles and voices and general naivety towards the injustices in the world were perhaps the only reminder of what once had been worth living for in this world.

Perhaps it was freindshop that drove these boys apart, but maybe it was society. As seasons passed, and they grew older, they grew separate. Their faces lengthened, their wrists thinned. Joshua’s hair turned light brown, his eyes a faded green. He was neither skinny nor fat, tall nor short—just another perfectly acceptable, unremarkable member of this pseudo society. And Nick, the other of the two by just a week but nothing more, found his hair to be a darker brown mess that never stayed in one place. He had a deep brown stare that always ended up being focused out a window, toward the hills, when a teacher’s lessons were all too often forsaken for the view of the fires that still burnt red to black, even after all these years, all these changes. Nick was often too loud, and Joshua too quiet, but it didn’t really matter anyways, they seemed to balance each other out.

“We shouldn’t settle for this,” Nick scowled one day too loudly in Joshua’s bedroom, “We deserve better.”

“What? Homework?” Joshua laughed a bit because he was the only one of the two that had ever given a thought to his homework.

“No, you idiot—I mean this…life! I dunno, fuck!” Nick exclaimed, looking like some insane idea had just overtaken his mind, “Fuck. I don’t want to be a damned laborer!”

“Is that what you’re still tripping over?” Joshua asked, his voice as flat as his face. The boys had just taken some career aptitude test at school. The kind of thing that people always said didn’t matter, but everyone knew they did.The results went to the government anyways—and fuck, the government was everything, really. And if the government said you were to do X even if you wanted to do Y, you had little choice but to do X—just as you were told. Joshua had been happy with his test—it had suggested he look into a high status position for this very government, while Nick’s suggested he do unskilled labor. Needless to say, the slightly older boy was smarting over this insult.

“Uh,” he stuttered, not wanting to public admit his distaste for said career.

“Don’t worry about it. If you’d maybe do your work for once, you could get something better.”

Nick scowled and looked at the clock, “Yeah. Whatever. I’m going to go, my mom wants me home before dark.” And without a goodbye, he sprung up and out the door so quickly that Joshua hadn’t quite realized what was happening until it already had.

Joshua figured his best friend would soon move past the test result. If he cared enough, he had time to fix it—the government monitored children over their school careers and were always interested by those who seemed to like to better their lives. Then again, Nick was the type of person that got determined and then determination turned to daydreaming and daydreaming to legend nothing was ever done to replace the sour jealousy that sat on his conscience for ninety percent of the time.

It had seemed, from the first days of their friendship, up to the present moment, that although nick was always the leader of the two boys, Joshua had everything so much easier. Had the concept still been around, Joshua would have been the wealthier, more popular, reputable friend. But it seemed that concepts like that—standing out, being more of less of something, had died long ago when the earth stopped giving and the people kept taking. In the back of his mind, Joshua knew Nick was not going to give this goddamn test restult up—but he doubted he was do something to bring the results up as well, and that was why he mostly ignored Nick’s scowls for the following few weeks. He would have to get over it.

There came a night however, that changed Joshua’s opinion of his best friend supremely. It was hours past curfew, hours past the time when the stars would have come out, years past the last time they had. There was a knock on Joshua’s window and the boy found himself dragging his legs across the room, from his warm bed to find his best friend at the window, looking manic and eager—even at this ungodly hour.

“I’m leaving!” Nick announced with jovial excitement, “Come with me, we don’t have to live like this bullshit!”

Joshua knew he looked confused as he stared at his best friend. “Um. What are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving!” Nick said, almost too loudly for the midnight conversation, “Running away! Fuck this—you can come if you want.”

“Wha—uh where are you going?” Joshua rubbed his eyes and wondered if this was some nightmarish dream. Nick was leaving…but to where. There was nowhere to go.

“We don’t have to live like this,” Nick’s eyes lit up against the black of the starless night around them, “There are people, Joshua—who don’t want to live like this. And I’m going to find them. And you can come or not, but I came to tell you.”

Joshua’s shifted his gaze around the nothingness that seemed to surround Nick. This was…unexpected to say in the least. Life wasn’t that bad, not to Joshua. It was a routine—a habitual rotation, easy simple, go with the flow life. Nick just needed to understand that—why couldn’t he just accept things like they were and move on? “You’re leaving…?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, more subdued now—but not surprised. Joshua was safe, invisible, comfortable. Nick had known all along he wouldn’t get a partner in running away. He was just here to say goodbye. Except now that it was time to say it…giving up seemed easier.

“Coming back…?”

“No. Um,” Nick stuttered and didn’t make eye contact, choosing to look at his feet instead. “Well. Bye.”

“Yeah…bye,” Joshua mumbled and watched as Nick, the best fucking friend he’d ever had, faded off into the black night for…well, ever.

**

Time passed and Nick became the neighborhood tragedy. Then the ill informed gossip bite. Then the sad story parents told their children. The rumor about the old lady—why she was so fucked up. Seasons passed, people forgot.

Joshua got the job he had been assigned so long ago. He married a woman, had two children and a dog. His life was exactly what people wanted—simple, neat, good. The type of family life that was described in one syllable words because there wasn’t much more to say than that.

Some days, he thought of Nick. Rarely though—because he really did avoid it. He wondered, mostly, what had happened. He thought of him forever as a child, cherubic and round, innocent and sweet in a way that was the closest thing to beauty that humankind possessed anymore. In the back of his mind, Joshua knew Nick had grown up, but he didn’t want to know. He wanted Nick to be the last inch of his childhood that hadn’t gotten boxed up and put into the attic, or filed away in some massive cabinet of citizens, on the day he graduated high school. So, life went on.

**

It was the largest disruption of the decade—the only departure from this humdrum clockwork machine that anyone in faded memory could recall. One fall, a group of rebellious troublemaking kids, or maybe adults, had infiltrated a government building. They ran loose though the hallways, screaming chants and leaving plainly marked path of disarray behind them.

Now it just so happened, this building was Joshua’s building, and ever the scaredy cat—he hid under his desk, a small gun clutched against his skin, the cold metal hitting skin and reminding him of what the damn thing was for. He could hear footsteps outside and no, no, no he did not like this. He did not like what this was coming down to—no. The door opened and he crouched under his desk even more, like it was the last thing between him and death, him and everything else. But his attacker, or not even attacker, didn’t seem to care. He was just rummaging curiously through papers, boxes, shelves. Joshua could have sworn he knew him from somewhere—but this intruder had a hat on. Still. His movements, his gestures—Joshua watched him for altogether too long. Because finally the man turned to the desk and seemed to maybemaybe see the end of Joshua’s pant leg and overtaken and shaking with an odd fear, mixed with adrenaline and intuition, felt his finger click down on the trigger and before either knew what had just happened, a bullet flew and the mystery was dead.

And so now Joshua stood up, shaking as death filled the room and claimed one of its occupants. He swore he could feel the life leave the room, he suddenly knew he was once again, or maybe for the first time, utterly and truly alone. But morbid curiosity got the better of his fingers, and he couldn’t help but just pinch at the black ski mask just to see, just to see what death looked like.

Yet under the mask wasn’t death. It was a brown haired boy with a dark brown stare that was now forever transfixed at the hills that were still, after everything, burning outside the window.