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A dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead.
You knew you were going to die, once. You knew that everyone does, you've known it since you were old enough to know it, and old enough to be afraid.
You can feel the hull shifting with the pressure. pressing a fleshy hand flat against the rough stained metal walls, and its like pressing a hand to the chest of something dying, like fitting your hand against someone's ribs just under their chest where the abdomen slots in just so, like the smell of a rusted eaten-at park slide you cut your hand open on, and you can't find yourself being angry. The others were, but you aren't.
You aren't afraid now. You know you should be. You know, but you aren't, and maybe that's why you're down here in the first place.
Because you're not what you are, and desperation will feed anything.
The universe is dying, or maybe it's just you. You never liked thinking like that, never liked those cynical things and never liked pessimism, never liked being that kind of person to make the room uncomfortable in the quiet way thankless loathing does. You know it's true, but what you say and what you don't still matter even if you know your numbers are dwindling. The first time you saw a star die, it was beautiful. You can't count how many you've seen blink out now. There one day, gone the next. You wonder if it hurt to be reaped in that staring, soundless, still rapture. You wonder if it felt like anything at all.
Coordinates. Running numbers. Dragging fingers across a poorly printed map on flaky paper and no way to see which way was up except digits rolling around your head like bread dough kneaded into the brain-stem, grey-matter soft enough to warrant it, synapses firing like yeast grows. peppercorn. Your fingers are raw from pressing rough buttons of raw metal that was never sanded down, and your hands are cold and the air is humid. Maybe it's just warm, and your body hasn't caught up yet. Maybe you're just sick. You are, you know you are, there's a reason you're down here, a good one. A lot of people call them cruel, but they're not cruel, they're just people, and like people they're afraid of letting monsters back under beds so easily. You understand that, but you know if you live this, you don't know if you'd stop. You, the monster under beds. You, buried under thousands of gallons of blood. You, unworthy.
They're desperate, that's why you have this opportunity in the first place. They're begging for a reason to not have to kill one of their own, not now, not when they've lost so much. You all have, stations hanging in orbit like humanity hanging in free-fall. One day, there's not going to be enough to go around. One day, we're going to hit the floor.
You can feel the floor of the Lung scrape against the underbelly of the ocean, vibrating up your legs, through your knees. Navigating blind. Photos taken of things you're sure you shouldn't see, teeth & bones & fraying wild nerves. The first time you're jolted hard enough to crack your skull against the piping inside the Lung like ribs, only when your vision stops swimming and your legs find their footing to see digits that rolled to numbers that shouldn't be possible, you knew you weren't alone. maybe that's a comfort, in a funny, panicked way. that they'd been so afraid of being left behind, that they never thought they'd find anyone else. Your hands find the buttons again, the Lung groaning like a sick patient pleading for health, and you wonder if it's better or worse then. You rattle off coordinates, you've done this so many times before, and as you do a part of you wonders about how hungry it might be. You wonder if its starving, if its dying just like you. You wonder if drowning would be worse than being torn apart by its teeth, hull breaching in a crumpled instant that might be enough to earn a place on the map. You wonder if it could, in a downstream epiphany of intelligence or desperation or improbability, know that without your return, more will come. You hope it does, in that way the hopeful howls in your chest, hope for anyone but yourself. You hope it does. You hope they're not scared enough to damn it like they damned you. You hope a lot of things all at once and not at all, meanwhile the blood gets older, meanwhile something moves in the space beyond the camera and the porthole, meanwhile someone else lives their life, rationing what they have, hoping for what they don't.
The back of hell bursts aflame, and you, dutiful, extinguish them. You can taste the carbon dioxide on the underside of your tongue, your hands shaking with pins and needles, your heart hammering in your chest. Suddenly you hope it can hear that. You hope it hears your heartbeat like a rabbit with a fox, you hope it can find you in the murky dead waters, you hope so desperately and so fervently it makes your knees weak, gripping at the pipes as your back presses against them, facing inwards to the lung as your back maps the ridges of the hull. The back of your head makes a reverberating thunk against the metal, controls within view but you don't move, and the hope makes you want to cry. You want to sob like a baby, collapse like the static-tension of the humidity clinging to the walls was the only thing keeping you upright, and God you don't know if you want it to live more than you want to. The optimist howls, howls, howls, shaky breathed and pleading and high like the whine of a creaking door-hinge. You want to slam the back of your head against the hull until something pops. You want to taste what it is this thing lives in. You want to starve to death, you want to swim, you want to feed something hungrier than the God that left you behind. You want, want, want.
But you don't, of course you don't, you're dying down here whether you like it or not, and no matter which way you cut it, your delirium won't make it more than what it is. What it is is digits, what it is is bleached bones at the bottom of an ocean, what it is is you and nothing else except something in the water that you can't see and don't know and an instinct that consumes you like raw meat eaten whole in one swallow. You don't, and instead you peel yourself off the inner walls of the hull, pick up the fire extinguisher, bash it against your forehead hard enough to make you see stars for a few glorious, white-hot moments, and then you set it back down, and you keep going. You keep going, because no matter which way you cut it, you keep going.
There's 3 marks left. Then 2. Then 1. 10 in total, and you're scared as you tentatively move through the moons tide. You're not scared that you won't make it back, that you'll die down here, you're scared that it's gone. You're scared that your alone. You're scared, and if it takes being bait to lure out life, then God, let you be the bait. Let you be the bait, and let you let it live. Let you see it for one fleeting, blinding, manic moment. Let you know with certainty that it is, it is and that is enough. It's enough. It's all you have. Blood is pooling in the cabin, David, pooling up to your knees and staining you, and you can smell it so viscerally you want to be sick. Blood is pooling and you've got only so much left to go. You keep going because ━
Then it finds you.
For a singular, iridescent moment, you are the fishing bobber pulled under.