In Between The Lines Of Vice

Chapter 1: Born To Die

When everything is silent, quiet and still, sometimes you could hear it. You can't describe it, a sound of a thousand sounds, but no sound at all. All the noise around you blocks it away, drowns out the fragile sound with laughter and sobs alike. No, everything must be quiet. Every creature that chirped in the trees must be frozen and every predator that growled must be lying sleeping in tall grass. When the forest holds its breath and the wind doesn't hum through the trees, then you can hear it.

No one knows what it sounds like, or if it's a sound. Some say it's a feeling, complete silence with your eyes closed letting all other senses run rampant.

Some say that it's a calmness, a suppressed version of death that would make you feel weak and helpless but never so alive. That you feel the tingle in your bones and the muscles in your shoulders relax when the absence of life and sound floods your ears.

Then maybe it was a sound. The sound of all absence of sound, like an intense ring to maintain your mind. That if you truly heard nothing while you could still hear, no beat of your heart, never an ounce of wind whistling through the trees, your mind would crumble.

It was a myth, a legend, nothing more than a story sang in the night under the stars. He knew better than most that a story could be so much more, so real. He had never heard it, heard nothing to hear something, but he knew that one day he would.

Death. That was when you heard it.

Death is a strange thing. You go your whole life avoiding the inevitable, the consequences of life and your decisions. You wish that you had more time in the world of the living, then let go one day with no knowledge of where you end up or how much you will wish that you are still alive.

They say that all death does is take, take your family, your friends. It takes they lives of those who haven't lived, and those who have lived to long. It takes the pain away, but it also takes you and what you were from the people closest to your heart. It takes, takes everything, everyone. The one thing that no one could ever escape.

Death makes you strong, as it does with a soldier willing to kill to protect what he believes in and protect those he loves from the things he hates. Death makes you weak, as soldier screams in the dead of night from the nightmares, every bang from every gun that hit its mark. It makes you hardened, standing strong like steel. It takes your nightmares and makes them real, staring you in the face with a vicious grin.

It sometimes has mercy, then is merciless.

Death is strange.

There was once he felt that he had power over fate, over death. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the city and the intense Autumn heat had spread through the air before it turned into a frozen hell. The sky was overcast, which was about as unusual as traffic, and you could smell the pollution in the air with every wasted breath.

There was a girl though, which could have been the standard reincarnation of Aphrodite. She was couldn't have been more than 7 and a crown of curly blonde locks fell just past her ears. Blue eyes stared through the glass, her head rested firmly against the window watching the cars pass. She closed her eyes though, tight, as the volume rose.

"If you weren't such an arrogant prick maybe you could have picked your daughter up from studio!" The mother ground out through clenched teeth.

"You never told me about it!" The father yelled back. "What do-what do you want me to do? Huh? Develop telepathy-"

"I did tell you about it! Then I put it on the calendar, and then made an alarm on your phone!"

"You did not! There-" She cut him off abruptly yelling.