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You think it’s somewhat unfair that being dead does not equal not being. For your whole life you’d imagined death as being the ultimate end of all things, a cutoff beyond which you would no longer have to pay attention to anything at all, no longer have to do or say or be anything, and it turns out that you were wrong about that as well as everything else.
At first you hadn’t even been aware of being aware. There had been the mad, sick, furious horror on the meteor, your headlong rush into annihilation, the look in Fef’s eyes when you had finally, finally, finally done something that could not be forgiven
(oh god fef)
and the glow of Kanaya’s white fury and the roar of her chainsaw and then everything exploded in a soundless flare of astonishing, amazing pain, and then nothing; nothing for long enough that you suppose you had gone to what the dead do instead of sleep. But slowly, slowly, you had begun to sense things again. Slowly you had woken up.
Most of the time the bubbles aren’t all that interesting; there’s LOWAA, of course, angel feathers raftering down from the sickened sky to stick in tufts of white down-fluff to the violet blood surrounding you. You are bisected neatly just at the waist; you can see your lower half a little way away. You think probably you look better from any other angle than this, because really purple intestines spilling out of blue pinstriped skinny jeans--while an interesting symphony of color and texture--don’t really scream sophistication and elegant nobility.
(You have noticed that Kan did a bang-up job with the saw, really. She cut you right between two vertebrae, there’s the slightly shinier face of the disc of cartilage visible, didn’t even nick any of the bony processes. Fuckin’ beautiful work there.)
Sometimes you are underwater, in the bubbles. When that happens the blood spreads around you in a veil, in a cloud, your own color blinding you to everything else, and you think with the clarity of posthumous hindsight that this is peculiarly, and unpleasantly, apposite.
You hurt all the time, which is hardly surprising given the fact that you are cut in half. It’s tiring, pain is tiring, and you drift in and out of your awareness as the bubbles pass you by.
This time when you realize you’re not alone you are in a bizarre cavernous space blinking with telltale lights and draped, coiled, writhing with vivid fuchsia tentacles. The smell of the sea is all around you, dank and salty and familiar, with a metallic tang you do not recognize.
In the middle of the room what you had initially thought to be a pillar raises a drooping head and stares at you with blue-scarlet eyes and you think: Captor, but Captor isn’t dead, is he? You had merely blinded him with science. He deserved it, too, goddamnit.
That isn’t Captor, though. That’s someone...else, someone older. Someone who is...
Someone who is a Helmsman. You stare, your deadlight eyes wide behind your violet-spattered glasses, as you take in the details. Of course you’d known what a Helmsman was, you’d always known how that works, but seeing it is different from knowing about it, and what you’re seeing makes you shiver with nausea: the tentacles are in him, he is hanging from the ceiling and bound to the floor, a column of troll stretched between living stalactite and stalagmite, the fine questing tips of the biowires threaded into his skin and flesh. You can see some of them are moving.
Yellow blood is visible here and there.
He looks at you. Like Captor’s, the eyes behind his goggles are blank red and blue: he’s alive. You want to be sick and you want to hide and you want to stop hearing that unpleasant little organic tearing sound that keeps happening as the tentacle wires move underneath his skin.
“Who are you?” he asks, at length, and the voice is like Captor’s but not, deeper, older.
“Eridan Ampora,” you say. You don’t add the customary fuckin’ in the middle.
The Helmsman laughs, an unpleasant clotted noise. “Dualscar’s get. Who cut you in half?”
You realize who he is. “You’re the Psiioniic.”
“Full marks for observation, kid.” The eyes blink off, on, closed for a long moment. “Welcome to the Battleship Condescension. Not...what you’d expected, perhaps?”
“Oh my God,” you say, and you raise yourself on your elbows, wincing as your trailing innards stick and tug at the floor. “You’re Captor’s ancestor.”
“You always this articulate? --Ngh, stop, stop wriggling like that, you’ll lose something.” He sounds so tired, you think, and the wires are moving, the wires never stop moving, and what must that be like, hundreds of sweeps, thousands of sweeps hanging there in his bonds with the wires wriggling and questing and burrowing into him, how much of him is even left under all of that, did they cut him in pieces before they hung him up to run the Condesce’s flagship or has he still got hands and feet numb from centuries of disuse? “You haven’t been dead all that long,” he’s saying. “I can tell.”
That surprises you enough so that you lose your tenuous elbow-balance and topple back to the sticky floor with a thud that drives dream-breath from what’s left of your lungs, and you groan. You don’t think you have ever, actually, felt this terrible, alive or dead.
Something taps at your foot, which you can feel despite the fact that it’s no longer attached to you by anything other than ties of affection, and you squirm until you can see that oh god it’s a tentacle, it’s a tentacle, is this what’s supposed to happen to you after all, are you going to spend the rest of eternity dangling in a writhing mass of fuchsia--and the Helmsman sighs. “Nobody told you you didn’t need to stay like this, huh.”
“W-what?”
“You’re dead. I’ve seen so many walking dead, kid. So many bubbles. All of them eventually learn that they can put themselves back together.”
The tentacle wraps around your ankle and you make a thick negatory sound and try to squirm away, but it’s a lot stronger than you are and with your spine cut in half you haven’t got leverage. It’s...not slimy, either, it’s warm and dry, like a snake. “I can’t. I’m stuck here, because I am still of use and until that’s no longer the case I am not allowed to die.”
You stare at him. The voice is dry, businesslike. “How...how long?”
“Have I been a ship? A very long time, Eridan Ampora.”
Your legs are moving. He’s...he’s doing that, he’s the tentacle, he’s dragging your legs back over to your torso, and oh it hurts, it hurts but you are powerless to stop him. There is an unspeakable wet squashing sound as the two halves of you meet.
He chuckles, a low noise that makes you think of feedback flutter in a microphone. “Pull yourself together.”
You think you almost hear a pun in there, yourshellf, and it hurts, oh, fuck it hurts, it hurts so very badly that you barely notice when something odd happens to the middle of you and all of a sudden your spine seems to have decided to be one piece rather than two discrete halves.
The helmsblock goes dark for a moment, two moments, as you try and grab hold of reality--or dream-bubble reality--and make it make sense; and then oh god you’re sitting up, you’re actually sitting up and violet blood is oozing from the gash Kan’s chainsaw made but you’re no longer in two pieces. “Tie that up with your horrible scarf,” he’s saying. “You’re getting blood all over my nice clean floor.”
You obey. It is so strange to be whole again, so desperately strange, and you sit on the floor and you stare up at the Psiioniic and you can’t help asking “why?”
“Because you needed it,” he says. “Because being in pieces is no way to spend eternity, and I should know; because a friend of mine would have.”
“They cut you up,” you say, and it isn’t a question. “Didn’t they. They...cut you up and they hung you in her ship.”
“It is my honor to serve Her Condescension.” Bile drips from every word. “The greatest honor that can be imagined by one of my caste.”
“It’s what would have happened to Captor.”
“If he was very lucky. If he was the most fortunate of Geminis he might even have been selected to helm the Heiress’ own flagship.”
“Fef,” you say, and you wrap your arms around yourself.
“She is very lovely,” says the Psiioniic. “And very young, and very sad.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Our bubbles intersected a little while back.” His eyes close, open again. You had not known it was possible for anyone to sound that weary. “She wept for me, Ampora. And I think for you.”
You manage, unsteadily, to get to your feet, a thing you had not imagined being able to do ever again. “I killed her.”
“She knows.”
“I glubbin killed her, I don’t...I can’t....I...”
“Shut up, kid,” he says, so tired, so tired and so worn. “You have the rest of eternity to find her and say sorry.”
“But I don’t...”
“Ah, hell, I’m waking up,” says the Psiioniic. “Her Condescension doesn’t let me sleep a lot, you know. It’s inefficient.”
You grab at your hair, pull handfuls of it through your fingers, drag your bloody hands down your face. “I don’t understand anything,” you wail.
“No kidding. Give it a couple hundred sweeps and you’ll get there.” He’s fading out, the room around you and its unspeakable biowires dissolving even as you watch.
“Wait!” you say. “Wait. I. Um.”
“What is it?” He sounds annoyed.
“Thank you?”
There’s nothing but a sort of blue-red flicker where you think his face had been, and then you’re back in nothingness--which fades back to Wrath and Angels again, it always defaults to Wrath and Angels but this time you’re in one piece and you hurt all over for a different reason than a chainsaw.
He’d said you would understand.
He’d said you’d find her.
You wrap your bloody scarf tighter around the wound that goes right through you and you look among the violet-stained drifts of feathers for your rifle, and--painfully, slowly, each step jarring your torn insides--you start to search.