Chapter Text
He wakes up to what he had fallen to.
At least then, it had been a quick reprieve. Some lingering thought that at least, at the very least, he wouldn’t get to suffer.
Perhaps that was too outrageous a thought.
Trembling gloved fingers skitter to the first part of his body he can’t feel, and he realizes that he hasn’t seen the skin beneath for long enough to feel the harsh material and its ridges dig into his mutilated flesh, and feel his bare hand was truly there. It comes back glistening and tinted red in the shaking daylight, and he just shudders with the beginnings of a giggle, delirious, short and pained.
He’s alive.
Now that’s the fucking punchline.
His other arm is quiet, while a single leg screams. It’s a slight solace, despite knowing that his shoulder is at a strange angle. That his breaths sputter, and every cough sent his lungs rattling and chest spiking with sharp, sharp, sharp stabs, bringing with them waves of red agony and balled-up screams in his throat.
His eyes see nothing of consequence, for one of them is swollen shut and the other hurts to keep open, and he is too afraid to remove the helmet, not because it will hurt, but because he knows he wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to get it off and remove the shards embedded in his skin in the first place.
A laugh bubbles up again, and his chest heaves against the white-hot hurt, as he splutters and coughs up globs tasting of iron, greedily gasping for air. It’s easy enough to ignore the agony when it’s all he’s known for a while.
There’s not much left, anyway. Not that it matters. Everything has been compromised.
He can hear the muted sounds of the ship’s alarm somewhere, something about a breach, glitching in and out of coherence. His arm rests on a broken beam, one he recognized because he’d lean on it when talking to the Captain. He doesn’t want to think about where the rest of it is. There is glass stabbing at his open wounds near his legs, only one of which he can feel vaguely, and that must be the windows. Something natural, not mechanical, titters in the distance. The hull is not intact. The ground is metal but it’s dusty, bloody, metal. Dusty? Right.
And.
And, he is alive.
Gurgling, uncontrollable laughter ensues, slicing him with its depravity. It hurts him, every second, but he laughs, and laughs, and laughs. He feels the blood flecks fly from his mouth, some dribbling down his lips like drool. The movement makes whatever is embedded in his chest hurt more.
There’s not much else to think about, not that he can. The joke is just that funny.
He wheezes. His nostrils burn.
So this is it, then. It couldn’t even be quick.
He thinks to the creatures he’d slain on this forsaken planet, thinks to what he’d left behind. His crew, the glint of cold metal with a splash of red to match their executioner’s garbs. That he’s the last of them, and the first to die without a cause at all.
Heh. Heh, heh.
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe-
The darkness closes in like the setting sun, a predator stalking forth with a certainty, straight towards the sweet, sweet scent of each one of the wounds lining his mortality.
He rushes to it, of course. There’s nothing else to see.
The sword pierces his chest, and he only feels it after a few moments, when it’s yanked back out and he drops to his knees. A flash of magenta, a glint of gold, of silver and the way his blood coats that blade. Darkness at his peripheral, shaped like the figure in front of him. The stench of something burning. Something bleeding.
Must be his explosives. Explosive energy. Ha.
His fingers curl around the gun at his waist, whipping it out to fire a shot. It doesn’t work, he’s too slow and his vision swims.
But. But, he never misses.
The being in scarlet lets out a shout, but it does nothing after all.
He feels the metal cut into his burning flesh again, and again, and again.
Through it all, he shudders with something approaching the start of a giggle.
Why?
He drops to the ground and with a crack, at least, at least this is quick.
“You thought me defeated?!”
No. No, I did not.
They freeze-
-and the Sanctuary Guard’s missile hits its target. It’s the second one that takes advantage of the ringing in their ears and blows them to smithereens, their world to darkness.
She runs, and runs, because the laser stream is about to hit him. The giant worm glows red at the segments, and she barely blinks aside in time to dodge that attack.
Something tells her that death by incineration would really, really fucking hurt.
She reaches for the teddy bear at her belt as she ducks behind a collapsed structure. Think, think, what-
Her fingers grasp air.
His belt doesn’t have it.
Did he drop it?
Did she-
She freezes.
What was she looking for again?
The head of the blue worm pops up, and she barely gets away, stumbling. The red worm spots her again, and so she takes off running once again, firing an arrow behind her. Her fingers close around her glaive next. The segments, the segments, she just has to incapacitate it.
What was she looking for?
Was she looking for something?
Why did she stop?
Why-
Sometimes, he will grasp items that aren’t there, weapons they cannot possibly have.
Sometimes, she looks around and sees he is somewhere else entirely.
ENEMIES DETECTED.
Sometimes he turns around, and there is no one there, but he wonders if there is.
HURT. APPLY FORCE TO ALL ENEMIES. APPLY FORCE. APPLY FORCE, APPLYFORCEAPPLYFORCEAPPLYFORCEAPPLY-
He dreams of teleporters, of places he’s never seen.
He dreams of weapons he couldn’t have, enemies beyond his wildest imagination. Blood, rivulets streaming from a gash he hadn’t noticed. This is what’s happening now, right?
His chest just hurts some days, even though he was never hit.
Sometimes, he can’t get up because it feels like something is there, tearing through flesh and sinew and tissue to hold him down.
Later, he sees the figure in magenta and hears the screaming on the comms, and sees the broken ship and the blood staining the floors, and he isn’t surprised. At. All.
He screams as each of his organs and existence is incinerated and somehow, this is exactly, exactly what it should feel like.
She wonders how it is that her movements feel rehearsed and yet, so, so wrong.
His grapple gun feels like it could be something else entirely.
…
No, it’s not-
He’s been here before.
…right?
Nah. Just a bad dream.
She writes as she dips into her wounds with a finger, trembling with every letter in scarlet.
You are trying your best to survive.
He clutches a piece of metal, tearing against the rock with a robotic precision.
You consider yourself a fast learner.
They remove their belt. It’s heavy on their wounds. They always carried a pen, to draw on schematics and plans, for vantage points.
But… they couldn’t tell you why they had it.
You have been feeling lucky.
He gurgles with laughter.
You have been experiencing feelings of deja vu.
If you understand, do not read the next paragraph.