Strange things happen to memories in a vacuum. All the edges get chipped away, smoothed by the flow of time.
Nobody knew the pains of conflict better than the owner of the fingers that brushed at the dirt, nobody had experienced what it could do to a person like the man behind the eyes that flicked over the straight line emerging from the warm black soil.
Everyone thinks that a memory is something permanent, an indelible record; that's what makes it a memory after all. Nobody notices how transitory they are because they can never quite remember how exactly they've changed.
But a vacuum can make thoughts that coil around that sort of logic too.
He'd called them tools before, believed that knowing them as anything else imbued them with a sort of significance that made them all too easy to blame. A good workman never ever blames his tools. A good assassin never blames anyone but himself; that's why there are so few good ones, it takes a strange mind to accept that much blame for a living.
He would admit though, now that there was nobody there to hear it, that they were something more.
Memories accumulate around objects, give them something more than the simple structural details, the sum of their parts and the purpose they serve. They have to attach themselves, swarm around something real and give it history. A darkened lilac hand rose to his breast, feeling the faint outline of the silver chain that hid beneath the simple white shirt.
It was strange really, he had never intended to collect the two shards that nestled between the grooves of his fingers, had he been more superstitious he might have believed they had found him. Two blades, one serrated with a wicked curve that seemed to have a sharpness that extended beyond its edges, the other a piece of cold blue metal that carried with it a worrying degree of sleek simplicity.
Right and left.
Passion and serenity.
Jivan and Titan.
He had buried them for a reason, they had weighed heavy in his hands as he had climbed the cliffs, heavier everyday he had wielded them; whether they had been used for good or ill was a question even he had given up on after all these years.
Heavier and heavier, until he had found the strength to drop them.
Maybe that was it, maybe all this time they had been making themselves weigh more and more until he had grown so strong from carrying them that he overcame the weakness of needing them. Maybe that was just vacuum thought.
But now, as he looked down with those cold grey eyes, they looked different. They still had that weight to them, that feeling that until they were buried again you would never really stop seeing them, but now the weight had an air of reassurance.
Strange things happen to memories in a vacuum; one day you wake up and all find that the painful details have washed right out of them, like ink fading from parchment. What's left is nothing but a time and a place, an amalgamated feeling for what once seemed like a horrendously incongruous time. What you have left is that half-here feeling, that little void of what was and now isn't.
With a funeral smile; remembering the good and feeling the bad; and dirty hands, the blades disappear again, back into the world.
What's left is memories; places for a period.
And people. Always people.
