She hated the smell of lit cigarettes. It made her cough and stung her eyes.

She hated it and he knew it.

She’d made it a point that if he wanted to stay friends then he wouldn’t smoke while she was around. It didn’t stop him smoking before she arrived though. He still stank of the fumes but she could tolerate that at the very most.

That night when she arrived at the park, she found him trying to light one up; the cigarette clamped between his lips, one hand holding the lighter and the other cupping the sputtering flame. He gave a low growl of frustration as he impatiently thumbed at the catch before giving up and chucking it at the ground.
“Stupid piece of junk,” he muttered, taking the unlit cigarette and shoving it deep into his jacket pocket. “Can’t believe I paid five bucks for this. What a rip-off!”

Sinking down onto the ground beside him, she stared at him while he uttered profanities under his breath. After a while he looked up at her and flashed his trademark careless, lopsided grin.
“Hey there, Claudia-babe. How’s it going?”
She smiled wryly at him and punched him in the arm good-humouredly.
“Drop the ‘babe’, Ash. Didn’t I tell you not to call me that?”
“Ha!” Ash laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. “Seems I’ll never bring you ‘round.”

“Honestly,” Claudia shook her head. “What kind of a guy calls his friends ‘babe’?”
“Why, a kind of guy like me of course,” Ash patted himself on the chest. “And anyway, you’re not just any friend. You’re my girlfriend.”
“Girl friend not girlfriend, you big dork,” Claudia commented dryly.
“Semantics,” Ash raised his hands and shrugged. “Weren’t they all one and the same?”
“To you, maybe,” Claudia retorted.

Ash laughed again and threw his arm around her shoulder. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of cigarette smoke and wriggled out of his hold.

“You smell awful,” she said to him.
“That so? Oh well,” he replied noncommittally. “You got a lighter?”
“No. Why would I have a lighter? And even if I did, why would I give it to you?”
“Ahh, ouch. Guess it was too much to hope for.”

Claudia sighed. “Ash. You gotta quit smoking.”
“Why for?” Ash said in that infuriatingly nonchalant tone. “I’ll ruin my body however I like.”
“You want to die of lung cancer?” Claudia asked dubiously.
“Hey, it’s my ‘way out’, okay?”
“Your ‘way out’, huh?” Claudia echoed numbly. Ash was always looking for a ‘way out’. For the most part he was a misogynist and had also expressed a general hatred for society in the past. Claudia didn’t now what made her the exception to this rule.
Finding a ‘way out’ was Ash’s way of dealing with difficulties or hardships. School? He dropped out. Family? He spent most of his time out of the house. Society? He didn’t socialise. Life? Well, he smoked, she guessed. Claudia was unsure of where she fit into the equation, but she hoped to bring Ash some peace of mind.

“What’s it your ‘way out’ of?” Claudia blurted out, her curiosity getting the better of her. “Life?”
“Life?” Ash repeated, seeming surprised at the question. “Yeah, I guess. I got other ways too though.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah.”
“What are they?”
“Well, there’s them cancer-sticks. And…” he trailed off. After a brief pause he gave her another grin and poked her on the cheek with his finger. “I’ll tell you some other time.”

Claudia frowned in a troubled sort of way. “When will that be?”
Ash pondered over this for a while, stroking at his stubbled chin with his thumb before drawing his hand back through his unruly dirty-blond hair.
“Dunno,” he answered, looking bemused. “It’ll come out eventually. Come back here next week and I might tell you one of them.”
“And the other?”
He gave a short bark of laughter. It sounded crooked and wrong to her ears somehow.

“I hope I’ll never have to tell ya, babe,” he said.

---

She came back next week like he’d said. This time there was an empty book of matches lying discarded at his feet. He smelled of stale cigarettes and alcohol.
“Hey, babe,” he greeted her; then asked again: “You got a lighter?”
She shook her head ‘no’.
“Doesn’t look like you need any more,” she told him, pointing at the cigarette butts and burnt-out matches scattered around his left shoe. He heaved a long, uncharacteristically morose sigh and shook his head.

He said, “I really need one right now”. Claudia heard, “Things are getting really bad right now”.
“So,” she began, changing the subject. “Are you going to tell me your other ‘way out’?”

He stared blearily at her with a weary smile of his unshaven face before throwing his arms around her and drawing her into a tight embrace. Claudia felt a dripping wetness in the crook of her neck. She didn’t have the heart to push him away.

---

Claudia came back the following week with her gloved hands thrust deep into her coat pockets and a beanie jammed over her long brown hair. Upon arriving at the park, she stopped and just stared blankly. For a few seconds she did nothing and then… a smile turned up the corners of her mouth. She oughtn’t to have smiled really, but she just couldn’t help it.

Walking forwards, her sneakers leaving imprints in the snow, she took her hand out of her pocket and waved.
“Hey, Ash,” she called softly, standing over him. She took in just how beaten and shabby and… defeated he looked. Kicking at the empty glass bottle by Ash’s side, her smile widened slightly. It felt crooked and wrong on her face somehow.

“So this was your last ‘way out’, huh?”

Sinking down onto the ground beside him, she stared at his pale, white face, the gentle upturn of the corners of his mouth and his long eyelashes resting against his cheek as if in slumber.

“I brought you a lighter this time,” she said, pulling a supermarket-brand lighter out of her pocket. Reaching over and clumsily taking the unlit cigarette from Ash’s left hand, she flicked the catch and lit the end. Placing the lighter in Ash’s jacket pocket, she raised the cigarette to her mouth and blew at the end. A cloud of foul grey smoke blossomed into the frosty winter air and Claudia gagged at the stench, tears springing up and spilling down her face.

She hated the smell of lit cigarettes. It made her cough and stung her eyes.

Tilting her head back, Claudia cried and cried.

She hated it… and he knew it.

FIN.

“I’ll ruin my body however I like.”

This line was actually said to me by someone I know in a similar (but not all that similar) conversation - in some ways, I guess what he said 'inspired' this story. While Ash said it deliberately nonchalantly though, the person I was talking to replied in a more sad, offhand kind of way. I won't say who it was nor what the conversation was about, but suffice it to say that this was just a very, very small part of what we talked about that day.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this, Cain thought bitterly.

Kieran was supposed to have lived, lived his life to the fullest. But instead, he was dead and there was nothing anybody could do about it.

Cain followed the funeral procession with his eyes, watching the pallbearers’ stiff march to the beat of the drums and the family close behind it, weeping openly and dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs. He resisted the urge to tug at the hard, starched collar around his neck and move his aching feet into a more comfortable position.

It was supposed to have been a routine operation, nothing more. But it was unfamiliar terrain and there were landmines… and the ambush. No one knew what had happened first. He’d heard it was a chest wound but he didn’t know whether it had been shrapnel or gunfire.

Cain could hear the sounds of a powerful Haka further down the path, awaiting the pallbearers and their heavy burden. Being farewelled like a true soldier, said Cain’s mind. He gave an inward sigh at this thought. But even if it was and ‘honour’, it’d be best for everyone if they didn’t have to go through with this… ceremony. What use did a name and a medal have in death anyhow? There was pride and family name, but not much else. There wasn’t much to be gained in the death of a loved one, after all.

As the coffin drew closer, some people tossed flowers. Cain wished he could break his posture, his back straight and feet together; swap this stiff, uncomfortable khaki dress uniform and lemon-squeezer hat for a black suit, shirt and tie (‘regular’ mourning clothes, if you will) and join the rest in their sobbing and moaning and flower throwing.

He fought back the desire and instead continued to stand his ground alongside his friends and comrades who also stood, backs straight and feet together, clad in stiff khaki uniforms and lemon-squeezer hats, in two straight lines on either side of the path. Keeping his silence, Cain gave his fallen fellow comrade a mental salute as the pallbearers passed by and bade Kieran farewell for whatever came next in his journey.

---

It was at the burial site at the cemetery when Cain noticed her. When he first glanced at her he felt like she had been there the whole time but yet had only just arrived at the same time, not that that made any sense at all. She stood out to him somehow, in her frilly black blouse and matching pleated skirt. It looked to Cain as if she’d taken great care in the way she’d dressed that day and he wondered by he hadn’t noticed her before.

As he walked up beside her and clasped his gloved hands neatly behind him, he thought that she couldn’t have been any older than fourteen or fifteen, probably making her the youngest person attending the funeral.

“Did you know Kieran Ferris?” Cain asked her, staring straight ahead at Kieran’s coffin, his question as starch and plain as the uniform he was wearing. The girl blinked in slight surprise and looked up at him briefly before returning her gaze forward.

“…Kieran Ferris,” she echoed after a while. It almost seemed like she was trying the taste or the sound of the name on her tongue. “Was that his name?”
This response elicited a reaction of faint astonishment on Cain’s part and his eyes flickered down to the girl.
“You came to his funeral not knowing who he was?” he half blurted-out, nearly losing his calm composure. The girl shrugged and shook her head, her brown ponytail swinging from side to side.
“Yes. No. Kind of… not really.” She seemed almost embarrassed.
“Did someone bring you with them?” Cain questioned, scanning the crowd for anyone who might bear a familial resemblance to the girl. Again, she shook her head.

“No, I came by myself,” she replied. Cain was perplexed.
“What’s your name?”
“Huh? Oh – It’s Jan. Jan Freeman.” Came the answer. Cain nodded.
“Jan,” he repeated. “Why did you come here if you didn’t know who it was commemorating?”

Jan gave a wry smile and looked down at her feet.
“It sort of goes back to about a year ago,” she said. “There was this thing on the Dawn Service in a local rag. There was a photo with it and that guy… Kieran. He was in it, in the background. I just thought he looked like…” she looked up and her smile grew brighter. “Like he had a story, you know?

Something in Cain’s mood soured and he felt as if something in his stomach had plummeted.

A dreamer, he thought to himself in disgust. She’s a dreamer and a storyteller. How could she possible have the nerve, the gall to bring herself here with that kind of attitude? It was an insult to Kieran’s memory to even think of a thing such as that –

“Are you angry?” Jan’s voice broke into his thoughts. Cain snapped back to reality and realised for the first time that the muscles in his neck were tensed and his hands behind his back were clenched into tight fists. He unclenched them again quickly and glanced at Jan. She was peering up at him, not worried or fearful – just curious. Having no suitable reply, he looked away again.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he heard Jan say. “It’s not like I’m trying to be disrespectful to his memory or anything. And I didn’t come here to look for a story. I just saw him in a picture in the paper with a few lines about how some soldiers from our army died in the line of duty. I just came here to pay my respects, that’s all.”

“So is that how you think of things?” Cain cut in, trying to hold in the full extent of his anger. “That life is just one big story and so some people are more important that others? And when someone dies and their story finishes, it just gets forgotten and kicked aside and everyone moves on? Is that it?”

“Oh no, sir, you do me wrong,” Jan replied. He innocent alarm was infuriating. “Everybody has a story and they’re all just as interesting as each other in their own ways. Something about his just stood out to me. When someone dies, their story doesn’t end. It can be carried on by someone else, or like any other story, it can remembered and started again.”

Cain almost gave a derisive snort.
Jan looked back up at him in that curious way again. “And you…. It doesn’t really seem like it and I don’t think you notice it yourself. But you sort of think the same way too.”

Cain blanched. He did no such thing, thank you very much!
Jan offered him a brief smile. “You must do, or we wouldn’t be talking otherwise.”

Cain left then, having nothing else to say. He couldn’t hold in his fury anymore.

Later on, he went to go punch a wall. It dirtied his glove and hurt a lot, but didn’t do much in the way of making him feel better.

---

It wasn’t supposed to end this way, Cain thought bitterly.

He was supposed to have lived, lived his life to the fullest – or at least until his twenty-fifth birthday. But instead, he was wounded, maybe even dying and there was probably nothing anybody could do about it.

Cain blearily followed the movements of his comrades with his eyes, watching them dart forwards and run for cover seemingly to the beat of his own racing heart and the rat-a-tat of nearby gunfire. He looked on the other felled soldiers close by him, either dead or screaming in pain or feverishly trying to plug closed gaping, bleeding wounds with their hands. Cain wished he had the strength to tug at the thick helmet strap pressing painfully against his windpipe and move his broken arm into a more comfortable position.

It as supposed to have been a routine operation, nothing more. But even though it was familiar ground to them now, there were bombs planted… and then there was the ambush. Cain couldn’t figure out which had happened first. He could feel that it was a chest wound, but as to whether it was shrapnel or gunfire… well, he guess that they probably caused the same amount of agony so it didn’t matter too much at this point.

While he lay there on the ground, sweat in his eyes and blood in his mouth, his mind wandered back to the girl (what was her name again? Something weird… Jay? Jem? Jin? No, wait… Jan, that’s right. Jan Freeman) that he’d met at Kieran’s funeral four years ago. He figured she’d probably be about 18 or 19 by now.

For a moment, Cain wondered about what she had said about everyone having a story all as interesting as each other’s. He thought of the curious way Jan had looked at him and the admiring manner in which she’d spoken about a man whose name she hadn’t even known. He felt sorry about the brusque way he had talked to her then and hoped she was as forgiving as her fairy-tale world seemed to be.

Oddly, while he was lying there on the sand of some desert in the middle of nowhere, miles away from home and probably bleeding his way to his grave - the only thing he could really think about with much clarity was her. Not his family or his friends or his girlfriend (although he did spare them a thought and send them his love, bless them), but a girl that he’d treated like a fool for her simple beliefs and way of seeing the world around her.

“Sorry,” Cain said out loud to nobody in particular. Even to his own ears his voice was barely audible. He had the deafening sounds of machine-gun fire and explosions to thank for that.
His mouth full of blood and saliva, Cain coughed wretchedly, gave a wide, bloodied grin and closed his stinging eyes.

He wondered if he looked as if he had a story as interesting as Kieran’s had looked, and hoped that Jan, the dreamer (if she was still around) would come to his send-off too. He gave this thought a wistful, mental half-nod. If his last chapter had to come to a close then he’d rather that it ended on the hopeful note of an optimistic young girl rather than the cynical outlook of a war-embittered soldier.

FIN.

Yes, Silence and Motion as in the piece from Final Fantasy VIII. It's not the first time I've labelled a story or chapter such either.

Jan and Claudia are pretty much the same character. Claudia is a character of mine (an extension of myself, almost) that I've been writing and developing for the last few years (her full name is Claudia Jan Freeman. She's the main character of my fic 'O-Cha!' at the moment. She's a very flexible kind of character, which is why I tend to use her a lot. By the way, her views on life and such may or may not denote the views of myself (to varying extents, especially in this one. 8D)