when there's nothing left to burn (3/?)
Sergio watches the seasons change.
For a long while, the sun is high and mighty and proud in the sky and the summer heat seems to be invincible. Brave souls venture outside only to take a dip in a pool or to race towards their frying cars. Sergio spends many careless days in the creek behind his house with Cesc, dreaming away precious hours and melting as much as he can into nature. The sun is sticky and hot but it is something constant in Sergio’s environment and he enjoys the moments that it sails above the baked earth. He thinks that he will eventually fade away into the shallow waters of the creek if he sits and watches his pruny fingers and toes for long enough, but he never does.
Autumn arrives unexpectedly, and Sergio is reluctant to purchase a winter coat and he ignores his mother’s pleas to wear a scarf, dear and he pretends that the cold doesn’t bite at his cheeks when he goes out alone at night to just go and stare at the stars.
It’s too cheesy, the way he thinks that he feels Fernando. He doesn’t receive a single letter from him, but he looks up at the night sky and tries to make out the formations of the constellations he never bothered to learn in school and remembers that these are Fernando’s stars, too. Sergio will stare for a while and smile and smile and suddenly stop because though it’s not ridiculous to assume that Fernando is looking up at same stars, it is ridiculous to assume that they’d remind Fernando of him.
He comes in one night after school starts and he hasn’t finished his Algebra assignment. His mother chews on her cheek and is disappointed, as always. She instructs him that tomorrow, he will begin Algebra tutoring to attempt to bring up his mark.
“With who?” Sergio asks. Her answer makes his stomach drop.
---
Sergio comes home with his first letter from Fernando at 6:55 pm. Olalla Domiguez shows up on the doorstep of the Ramos’ dwelling at 7pm, exactly on time.
She’s cordial and actually pretends like she cares about his mother’s petunia garden before she finally settles down in front of Sergio from across the kitchen table. She is perfectly dressed and perfectly proper and Sergio hates that she’s taking the highest level arithmetic class offered in the school and he hates her white smile and maybe he just hates her. It’s irrational, but Sergio has never really been a rational person.
“Quadratic functions, huh?”
Sergio shrugs and unfolds the corners of the letter underneath the table.
“Your mother said you did fine on the translations, so I’ll go ahead and move on to even and odd functions,” she says, drawing a pen across a spare sheet of paper. “It’s all quite simple, really. You just plug in a negative ‘x’ everywhere there’s a positive and check to see whether or not the results are altered once you distribute.” A pause. “You do know how to distribute, yes?”
Sergio isn’t listening. Fernando’s letter is resting quite plainly on his lap and he’s sure a grin is going to pop loose because the handwriting is just as he remembered it: neat and full of loops.
“Sergio?”
When he places Fernando’s letter directly on top of his class work and begins to read, he doesn’t bother to infer that his actions might spell out m o c k e r y or that they might instigate the development of a huge lump on Olalla’s throat, but they do anyways. He also doesn’t notice that, after a few moments when the sound of crinkling paper invades the silence, Ollala brushes past him and rushes out the front door.
---
Sergio comes home from school one day and his mother is rocking furiously back in forth in a rocking chair. It’s an old heirloom and he’s never seen her use it. She appears to be attempting to knit a scarf, but the tears streaming down her face have long blotted away all of the colors.
Sergio thinks that she might have accidentally burned a cake.
“Foolish boy… he never was particularly graceful. Should have left the dirty jobs to some poor country boy that our nation could afford to lose!”
Sergio grips the side of her chair and focuses on making sure that doesn’t forget to breathe.
“Lose, mom?” His voice is calm and calculated so that the dread in his mind doesn’t slip out his tongue. His mother takes a long drag across the scarf and sighs and cries until she finally feels like talking again.
“Yes, lose! Honestly, the officials ought to know better than to send someone of his intellect out on the front lines! They needed men like him to make sure the rest of the boys don’t blow themselves up! It’s really such a terrible, terrible shame. Number one in his graduating class, too!”
“Mom- I… Fernando? Is he…”
“No, of course not, dear--” Sergio breathes a sigh of relief but he feels immediately guilty again and wants to take it all back because “--it’s that Fabregas boy! You know, Elijah?”
Mrs. Ramos sits and fingers at her scarf and blows her nose a few times, so she doesn’t even notice that Sergio’s bolted out the back door.
---
After the funeral, Sergio strips off his best suit and tie and he goes for a swim in the creek behind his house. It’s nearing late November and he’s probably half crazy, but he gingerly sticks a foot in the current and then another.
Cold penetrates Sergio’s body and flows through his veins in a way that reminds him of blood. His lips chatter and he imagines the crimson liquid pumping and squeezing inside of him and thinks of what it might take to make it stop trying so hard. He’s submerged waist deep in the current and he’s holding his breath and he’ll keep holding it forever, or at least until Cesc’s brother is alive again.
He steps forward a few inches and inhales deeply before he dives underneath the water.
---
He’s walking along the side of the creek and just wearing his underwear despite the chill in the air when he hears voices and for a moment, he thinks that God is talking to him, but then he remembers that God isn’t here.
“Honestly, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I wish you would let it go, Gery…”
“You’re missing the point entirely! I’m trying to make you feel better, not worse!”
The two figures emerge from the brush in front of Sergio but neither of them attempt to mask their bickering. Sergio watches for a moment and just shivers.
“I don’t care that he received a Bronze Star, though! How many times do I have to tell you?”
Cesc’s tie looks like it’s looped too tightly and Sergio has the unreasonable urge to tear it away from his neck.
“He deserved it. He fought bravely and died for his country and he deserved it, Cesc. I wish that you would just acknowledge the fact that-“
“-He deserved more than that.” Cesc states simply.
“More than what? You don’t get much better than the Bronze Star. It’s the fourth best metal that you can receive and that means he did something really really brave, Cesc. He’s a hero! Not everyone has the nerve to man a machine gun while bleeding out from the leg...”
Cesc is making a strange face and Sergio isn’t sure if he’s going to hit Gerard or cry.
“Iker was right about you,” he states simply and for some reason, Gerard’s brow furrows and his fists ball up. “You don’t know when to shut up. You’ll never know. He’s not fucking a hero, Gery, he’s dead.”
Cesc makes out for the direction of his house and a soft breeze penetrates the air. There’s a long, long silence and Gerard curses and his mumbling pierces Sergio’s cold skin further as he dubiously starts in the same direction.
The air is cold but Sergio doesn’t go inside for a long while. He doesn’t want to curl up by the fire in his house and bundle up and defrost his fingers because then he won’t feel the way that the blood pulses inside his ears and the way it makes him want to scream.
---
There’s an extra seat at their lunch table at school today.
“You’re an idiot, Gery.”
“What?”
“I said, you’re an idiot!”
Bojan and Xabi are toying with the questionable contents of their sandwiches and are doing their very best to ignore the constant thudding and rocking of the table. Gerard doesn’t notice it, but he’s been kicking at its underside for the past few minutes.
“How is it my fault, Sergio?” Gerard slams his hand against the table. “His brother goes off and dies and now he somehow thinks that he’s too cool to be seen with us.”
Tension is rapidly clouding Sergio’s thoughts and he thinks that he might shatter the glass of water that he is holding.
“Would you stop bringing up Elijah?!”
“It’s been a month now. We can’t just keep going around and pretending like nothing’s ever happened-“
“-You pushed him over the edge. You should have never brought it up, and especially not in class. Honestly, what were you thinking? You know him, Gery. Probably better than anyone else. You should have known that he wouldn’t want to discuss how he’s… how he’s feeling about the situation in front of the entire Civics classroom!”
It’s a fresh argument, dug over many times by now. Gerard has always been self-righteous and Cesc has always been stubborn, but Sergio never expected the continuous fighting between the best friends.
“He’s changed, Sergio,” Gerard says and Sergio begrudges that he’s speaking the truth. “I try and go to his house, but his mother always says that’s he’s at soccer practice. But I know that’s bullshit because he’s just out with Ee-ker!” His words sound like they must taste like poison.
“That’s not entirely true; he did have practice on Monday…”
“I mean, what did he expect when his brother left?” Gerard spits. “No one comes home once they ship them out, he should have known that. Nobody comes back.”
Blood rises and floods into Sergio’s ears and he’s gripping onto the edge of the table, digging his nails into the fake wood.
Gerard realizes what he's said quite suddenly and his feet stop banging at the table. Silence hisses in Sergio's ears.
“You’re such a fucking… you’re so…” Sergio trails off.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I- I’m really- I’m sorry,” Gerard says, and though Sergio can tell that he means truly means it, the damage has been done.
“Forget it. Forget all about it,” Sergio says, and he means it.
---
Fernando has only been on the transport ship for three hours, but he’s already thrown up four times.
Rats and assorted insects scatter across the wooden floor of the underside of the deck and its two thousand beds groaning and squeaking under the weight of double the amount of men. Fernando is sharing a bunk with a battle-hardened veteran named Stevie and they both haven’t showered in a week, so neither of them notice the stench radiating off their bodies.
There is tension in the belly of this cargo ship; Fernando feels it. The boys try and mask their nerves through the releases of fist-fights and poker, but something heavy that smells like death and dread is looming overheard in the flimsy rafters and he thinks it would be foolish to try and label it otherwise.
He plays a few rounds of poker and loses half of his pay before he rolls over on his side and steps over sleeping bodies until he’s rounded a few hallways and made it outside onto the deck.
The breeze overtakes his senses and he realizes that the smell of the sea just makes him feel worse because it reminds him that he’s not going to go back home. He’s going to Europe. He’s going to test out the trajectory of his M1991 and shoot it and eat K-rations and stink and die, just like the rest of the men, but he knows better than to think about it too much. The ocean spray carries his thoughts away.
For a long while, the ocean is his refuge. It isn’t calming and the waves don’t make him feel small, like in the books. It’s just there and solid and endless, and he sees the moon reflected across the surface. He doesn’t see where the black ocean ends and the black sky begins, but he does see the stars. He sees the stars and the way that they seem to hold up the sea. He smiles and names one for Sergio.