02...

[Aiden Wanderer]

Churches. What sacredness could possibly be found within a building of mortar and stone? And what god would ever wish to dwell within such a crude depiction of the holy palaces of old?
I remember the screams. If anything, I remember just that. They echoed, one voice made into a thousand, filling the smoke-thick air with their eerie wail.
I still dream about it, even now. I thought Death-scythe would end my dreams. When they continued, I knew even death would not release me, that my Hell had been made on Earth as surely as in the afterlife.
It wasn?t until he came I understood what Father Lucas said about redemption.
It?s not that the world is going to get better. If anything, man will only continue to misuse and destroy what they?ve been given. But maybe, just maybe, there?s something here for us. Something left in the wreckage that was once a beautiful dream of hope.
That?s what he is to me.
Heero.
A dream made reality.
Sometimes, I couldn?t think about it all. Anything. Nothing. Sometimes, I just had to scream and cry and run and kill. Sometimes, that?s all there was.
Sometimes, that?s all there is.
But with him, it changed. There was no chaos, no tantrums, no trace of the humanity I had come to recognize left within those blue-black eyes, so deep, so cold, they echoed the emptiness of a well long since dried.
He was like me. We searched for something to fill us. Something to give name to the birth of destruction and the destiny of obliteration we were fated. There were no deceiving words of comfort. No falseness in his direct gaze, and through him, I found my peace.
In the eye of the torrid storm, whether ravaged by war, or silent in what the people named, a time of ?peace,? there is no end for me. There is no one to share my nightmares.
No one but him.
And through his disturbingly empty eyes, cold and direct, I find the truest soul of humanity, and the knowledge that my journey is over comforts me when the nightmares return.
So as I step inside the remains of another church, created by man to worship his Deity and blasted to bits by weapons created by man to become that Deity, I will stand at its center and stare up at the great dome that is our sky, an invisible barrier between lifes.
And in the rubble, among the broken shards of tenderly-stained glass and painstakingly carved icons, I will pray.
Perhaps without the thickness of the great ceiling, God will hear me better, and, as I bow my head to the rain, I am comforted in knowing He cries with me.