http://www.eltonography.com/songs/where_to_now_st_peter.html Two men are in a bar. It is on the very fringe of Earth control. The light is fading in the windows, the plastic on the bar chipped, and the standardization of the walls fading into decrepitude. The two men are jostling with other men, those of a civilian orientation, the mark of their service still about them in the way they move their lips, their hands, and the sense of who they are in relation to the words. There is a door opened with another going down the stairs, a woman calling behind him, properly dressed, the sense of satisfaction in a finished task, something not told nor defined in the bar. The two men in the light of the fading sun are dressed alike, with the cloth cut in the same way, their blue eyes mashing with the skylight, never in the way that those domed windows are supposed to be constructed. The first man is holding an authentic bottle with concern spilled over his face. The other is looking towards the door, for that is where their table is located, along the line of sight to that opening. The first man speaks – “I don’t see why you have to leave Wren." The lips are thin, the jaw cut along the lines of a dulled handle of a pen knife. There are the well battered features of his companion, built along the same lines, except that his eyes are slanted, the ears are curved, and the pupils are the only thing staring out of those milky red shot apertures in his face. “We've reclaimed three different systems and having you leave will make it ... ” The thin lips move around in search of a word, "We're bringing order to Cardassians - not further chaos." Wren pushes the splinters of the wood from the table. The men in the bar are thinning out, mostly due to the late hour, as illustrated by the clock that is nailed to the wall. The bartender is a stark bald headed blue man that is chatting up a storm with another with an earring. They are in uniform with the grand sweep of their lines to their shoulder blades. Their pistols are more of a cudgel than anything else, hangs from their waist. It is in the waning light from the window that urges the bartender to turn on the lights with a flicker, some of the waiters going to turn up their lamps, and the window howls in the cracks of the windows. "You ever get tired of that?” Wren lists with the whole drifting of silence in the bar. “I’ll told that to myself three years in a row. You were there for the first budget cuts. We don't matter and since everything is going back to Earth - who cares anymore.” "You don’t have to quit. You could join Doctors without Nations or maybe the Militia.” Cave insisted with his finger jointing some point towards Wren. The bar is almost empty, with the doors of the bar swinging back and shut. They are creaking, the sound of the tankards hitting the table, the light of the lamp capturing one of the earring wearing ones as female, black haired, the ridges on the nasal bridge, talking about the natives and how they earned it. There is the slight smell of acid in the air that makes the other one flinch. “Besides - if you're leaving us now - how many wars have we been through - three? The one we had, the liberation of Bajor, and the Dominion one? You're a lifer - not a quitter.” Wren finally breaks the wood. He draws himself from the table, hauling his jacket on, black, no other color except the dust stains on the sleeves. Wren doesn’t have a weapon. Cave doesn’t have a weapon either, with the stern nature of his face slipping into that role, a most insistent one, trying to peg a vagrant bird down from its flight. “I don’t know Cave - …I may not be a Christian…But I’ve done all what one man can. After all – you get kind of sick of silent places such as these. You might as well count windows instead of our work." Wren nods towards one that has no curtain, overlooking the other structures. It might as well be a Western town, the facades of civilization dropped in the middle of a man made desert, the last waking light of the day glinting on blasted black Cardassian steel in the dirt. Beyond that there are the mountains, the craters in the earth, the whispers of the wind through broken steel, the reclaimation sites, the whole planetary landscape rendered incapable of everything except the wind, howling through the hollow quarries of the dust covered world. "So –” Cave drawls out, the time in between in which more of those silver earring folk come into the bar, murmuring about the lack of Remans making the job easier, the woman upstairs paying the bartender something, overlooking the bar, and then leaving. He pulls out his computer pad from his jacket, a far more defined one, with the waiter being another younger bald headed blue skinned waiter coming in the shadows. There are only about four of them in the bar now, with those of the silver earrings left in that empty tomb. The emptiness is out there, out of the window, out the door, the road out there being the only certain thing of reality. “Are you going to get a blue canoe somewhere and float like a leaf?” the words are not in that grace note, in that rhetorical stab, that fails, the simple transaction in the pressing of the thumb. Cave catches Wren almost out the door, his face towards the sky now turned black, the lights coming on. “Yes- and ask your St. Peter on which road am I on” are the last words Wren ever says in the bar, stepping out, a last bow to Cave, and he is gone.
This whole scene has a very profound feel to it which is not surprising as some of the dialog comes straight out of an Elton John song. But, to be honest, I don't really 'get' it. Who are these guys and what are they talking about? Sometimes I think you might be the most misunderstood writer on this forum. Or - and I'm not ruling out the possibility - I'm just rather daft.
I've edited it so that it makes sense. Basically it's about a guy quitting Starfleet after the Dominion War due to the unpopularity of the war he fought and the current mission of reclaiming dead worlds from that conflict.
Yeah, I'm definitely getting a better sense of who these people are now. I also get a sense of Wren's disillusionment over what he's been doing. It's all rather faint and implied but very atmospheric. Well done.