Sounds... Fic
It was strange, how a sound could hurt.
The staccato of an automatic cutting across a barren plateau was the first. Raw, eager and naïve he’d been on that first mission. And that sound had changed it. It had been the first time he’d seen anyone killed, but it wouldn’t be the last by a long way. And he’d been the one wielding the gun.
So that was life-changing sound number one. A sound that he only realised changed his life years after the event.
Because you couldn’t go back from that - taking a human life, as he was to tell a young captain in many years time, tarnishes the soul. Taking a life in cold blood, rather than the heat of battle or in self defence, damaged it irreparably. It takes you to the abyss, though where you go from there is up to you. And on that day in many years time, he will be glad that his young captain made it through with her innocence.
So the sound of the automatic was noisy and deafening, but bearable. He’d learnt to take worse things than that for his country and his principles.
How about the single shot that seemed so out of place in the quiet of suburbia? He always felt like it should have sounded, have looked, have felt less horrifying. He’s seen men die before. He’s killed men. He’s watched children die because they got in the way of something bigger than him. He stands in the hospital, waiting for the doctor on the day of the second life-changing sound, ridiculously thinking of the time he shot a guerrilla fighter only to discover he was thirteen at the most. He wonders if that boy had parents and grandparents who wondered where he was, or whether they gave their flesh and blood to their cause willingly.
And this time he knows that that sound has changed his life forever.
Endless people tell him that its unnatural - outliving your child. He doesn’t need them to tell him that. Which is why he ends up in his son’s bedroom, gun in hand, contemplating life changing - or ending - sound number three.
This sound isn’t the poison of the machine gun - a slow build up in his system that will slowly destroy who he is. This sound is an agonising, gut wrenching heartbreaker. A sound that makes him scream silently, constantly, knowing that his hurt can never end because he can never regain what is lost. He ironically remembers the tagline - “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
If the first was a sound of things to come, and the second was a sound of things that are, then the third is a sound of things that have happened. Its like Scrooge’s ghosts have decided to visit in reverse.
With one sound, the closing of a ring box, he hands it back to her, realising that every dream he might have dreamt must remain just that, a dream. It’s a sound that shows him that those dreams come crashing down round his ears a long time ago if he’d only stopped to notice. But he was too busy avoiding her, convincing himself that her cop was a passing fancy, a fling, an attempt to get a life, not a real effort in that direction. And suddenly his major isn’t his anymore, even in his dreams. So he let’s her go.
“If things were different, I wouldn’t be here.” If only she knew how true that was.