Categories > Anime/Manga > Legend of the Galactic Heroes > pale september
The new recruits marched in with the beginning of the month and suddenly the dorms were crowded again and you almost forgot how hollow and empty they had been all through summer when the seniors had been home on holiday and the graduates shipped off to the front lines with crates and crates of their belongings stacked in the hangars at the other end of the old airstrip that was now overgrown yellow and thick with wild barley. On the first morning the new boys woke up a little earlier to run laps around campus and at the end of their laps, after they had waited for the stragglers to catch up and there was an uneasy silence over them that could go so many ways, the fit ones punching each other in the arm and the weaker ones leaning on the wall to catch their breath, someone had the brilliant idea of making everyone jump in the air and scream all together. You couldn't build solidarity in a group of lads more heartily than that, and it worked; they were the closest-knit batch for the longest time in the history of that academy, and they stood up for each other against the sophomores who didn't like being woken up every morning by a sound out of a hundred nightmares, and against the few teachers who inevitably found fault with one or other of them, and, most of all, they refused to tell anyone who had come up with the idea. They marched together, shoulders squared and freshly-cropped heads up, and every morning they ran past the old airstrip in the cool shimmering dark that seems to open up just before sunrise, when the bullfrogs fall quiet in their still ponds and the cicadas rasp more and more quietly and the mountains seem to stir from their eternal sleep, just a little, one day closer to the end of the world.
To the one senior in particular who reportedly most objected to being woken up before his time they presented a pair of giant pink earmuffs, fluffy enough to deaden the trumpet blasts of Judgement day as well as to suggest the wearer's balls were half the size you'd least like them to be. He found that on top of killing all sound short of a fire alarm, they kept his ears agreeably warm.
"You're not supposed to like it," their representative said when he found himself being thanked for the present as he passed by the classroom where the senior was slouched so far back in his chair he seemed in danger of sliding clear off his chair, even with an elbow stuck out on the windowsill and one foot braced impossibly against the wall.
"The colour is a little off," he agreed. "But no one's cared about my ears before."
The representative put a hand up as if to tug at bangs that were no longer there, blinked, rubbed the back of his neck instead. He had sharp grey eyes and a stubborn wide mouth and freckles all over his nose and cheeks. When he's thirty, the senior thought, he'll look fifteen; and he said so. The boy laughed and blew a raspberry in reply.
"You'll appreciate it when you're forty," said the senior, who could not have been more than two years older.
"I won't live till I'm forty, old man!" the boy jeered, but good-naturedly, and he threw out a mock salute and ran off. The senior sighed and closed his eyes. Secretly he was worried about what the boy had said but the afternoon was warm, the book on his lap was good and whatever the future did to them, that was somewhere else.
To the one senior in particular who reportedly most objected to being woken up before his time they presented a pair of giant pink earmuffs, fluffy enough to deaden the trumpet blasts of Judgement day as well as to suggest the wearer's balls were half the size you'd least like them to be. He found that on top of killing all sound short of a fire alarm, they kept his ears agreeably warm.
"You're not supposed to like it," their representative said when he found himself being thanked for the present as he passed by the classroom where the senior was slouched so far back in his chair he seemed in danger of sliding clear off his chair, even with an elbow stuck out on the windowsill and one foot braced impossibly against the wall.
"The colour is a little off," he agreed. "But no one's cared about my ears before."
The representative put a hand up as if to tug at bangs that were no longer there, blinked, rubbed the back of his neck instead. He had sharp grey eyes and a stubborn wide mouth and freckles all over his nose and cheeks. When he's thirty, the senior thought, he'll look fifteen; and he said so. The boy laughed and blew a raspberry in reply.
"You'll appreciate it when you're forty," said the senior, who could not have been more than two years older.
"I won't live till I'm forty, old man!" the boy jeered, but good-naturedly, and he threw out a mock salute and ran off. The senior sighed and closed his eyes. Secretly he was worried about what the boy had said but the afternoon was warm, the book on his lap was good and whatever the future did to them, that was somewhere else.
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