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381 EIC. The Iron Lung (SM-13).
The first sensation there should be is pain, tearing and ripping through flesh faster than your brain can process it. There is not. Rather, all there is for the Convict to feel is peace.
The crimson vitality fills his lungs and for a moment he does not wonder if this is death, he does not have to wonder. Warmth wraps him for the first time since Filament Station, trading fire for the unnatural care the ocean of AT-5 holds him in. Eyes flutter closed, are allowed the moment to put themselves to rest. Eyes that saw too much, that shed tears for compatriots that did not mourn for him as he did them, the eyes of a child, for that’s truly all he is. The lost boy wandering the ocean of horror, who pleaded for a mother who would not come before the flame.
Simon did not see the reactor explode. Did not see the sparks, the leaking blood from its steel pores, clogged with false hope; only stared into his eyelids, thinking of better times than these. Of times the sun shone its brilliance across a martian sky, where warmth could be asked for and received, not pulled from the iron walls of the Consolidation’s prisons; where Conviction Realisation did not exist, and the stars glittered in the void-black endlessness. Now, the warmth he scraped and cobbled together consumed him whole in a brilliant display, searing his skin and eviscerating all that there is of Convict number twenty nine.
But death is just as his mother said it would be, a woman made of starlight; with flowing silver hair forged of rivers run dry, and freckles spotting her face in long faded constellations. She will be gentle with you, his mother had mused, twisting his unruly hair into something that he could tolerate on his neck; she is gentle to us all, guides us somewhere beyond the stars.
Her hands are soft, riddled with silver rings adorned with moonlight; tender fingers twisting into his blood-matter hair, unpicking and unravelling the coils it has settled within; before it is the same wild order he’d tied back more times than he knew. The void isn’t so bad, not when life is no better, only that the scarlet marvel he’d witnessed for the split second life he’d lived in the ocean had rearranged into inky nothingness. Death’s musings whispered into her domain like the spring breezes he’d never felt on Eden, humming a sweeping birdsong melody, twisting itself into words he comprehended.
“There is another, is there not?” She queried as the last of his hair fell to his shoulders.
“Yeah, I.. I think so, her name is Ava, she came down here after me.. I couldn’t-”
“Shh, Child.” Death hushed,
“Don’t.. Please don’t call me that.” he uttered, like a detrimental sin. Child, Son, all pet names from a space station that wanted nothing more than for him to die.
“What would you have me call you?”
It’s a simple question, no more complicated than “What’s your name?”, and even then he struggled to form the syllables. Child, Convict, Butcher.
“Simon.” He admitted with no more grace than a punished child, but Death’s hands moved no faster, no rougher, only moved to meet his eyes, wiping the blood from his face.
“Simon, then.” She pondered, turning each syllable over in her thoughts as she spoke them. Her fingertips brushed over his skin, pulling the crimson marker of his death from out of his sunken features; he didn’t remember the last time someone touched him without the intent to harm, not since his mother. “This Ava.. she remains in a similar state to you, suspended in the veil. I suspect it has something to do with the creature responsible for your deaths.”
“Can you help her?” Simon jumped at the question, grasping its form in the space between his chest and Death’s.
“So selfless, Simon.” She mused, “I know you, I know her. I know she did not treat you well, and yet you ask after her aid before your own. Why?” There was no malice in the words, only the curiosity of a life beyond mortality.
“She showed me more mercy than anyone else in the fucking COI, that has to count for something, right?” He pled, or at least it felt that way, like a scrabbling animal behind his ribs, begging for the right to preserve another. Death did not judge, just moved her hovering fingertips along his skin and listened.
Death’s immortal heartbeat slowed for a moment as he spoke, words pulling on heartstrings worn stiff from infinite lifetimes of grief.
“You are kinder than the world should allow you to be, there’s beauty hidden in that.” She soothed, palm resting along his jaw, thumb shifting in careful motion.
“Did you..” Simon uttered as he allowed himself a second of being held. “Did you know about the Quiet Rapture? Are they still out there?” Naivety flowed from his lips, the hope of a child that hasn’t known the end.
“Oh, Simon.” Death breathed, “I comforted each and every soul that was taken in that.. Quiet Rapture. The stars melded themselves into my skin.”
“So they’re really gone? They aren’t still there, wondering where their satellites went?”
“If it brings you solace, I can tell you they did not die painfully. In fact, their deaths are some of the most peaceful I have ever known.”
“What happens now? To me, I mean.” He blurted, forcing the idea of the universe's collapse from his mind as the strings of hope began to slip through his fingers. “Am I really.. Gone, dead? Just.. just like that?”
“What happens now is up to you, Simon. You may choose to rest, to find peace with me and the others among the reignited stars, or you may return; and I will return you to life with the Captain.”
For palms so soft, with veins like reaching comets, Death’s stillness unnerved him like thorns to his flesh, like the searing pain of the reactor. For the last human face he saw, Simon still reprimanded himself for not recalling the details of Ava’s face, only remembering the angry scar and angrier voice, the one sharpened with bitterness and duty.
“Have you asked her the same?” He queried, “The Captain, Ava.”
“Yes,” Death mused, beginning to thread strings of luminescence between her slender fingers. “She asked for life. For you both, said that if the world isn’t fair, then to forge fairness ourselves.”
“And you’ll make sure..”
“I will ensure your safety, until you return to my hold legitimately.” She uttered, promising things that he never should have been able to believe. Fairness is not something to be made, it barely exists on its own, let alone stolen from a world that does not want to let it go. Yet the reactor fire sparked in his chest, filled his pores with softness and glee that maybe, just maybe, something would be different.
“Can I speak to her? You know, before we go?” It was insane, truly, to speak to Death is one thing, to be offered life from the palm of her hand is a heaven unafforded to most.
“I would expect nothing else, Simon.” Said Death, before starlight skin flitted in its own eclipses, constellation freckles shifting and rearranging into masses of light.
“She’ll be waiting for you, in the space between. And I am with you always,
Forge your own freedom, Simon.”
It is the last whisperings of the woman before she is gone, wisps of her twisting through the air in streaks of starlight, bleaching protection into his hair; pressing sigils into his skin that frost themselves white. For a moment, there is nothing but air, before the ground is solid beneath his feet, and the Captain stands across from him.
Her hair bears the same streaks, skin the same markings, like delicate musings of the stars on their skin. For the first time since his mother, someone is relieved to see him.
“Simon?” She calls, squinting worn eyes across the space between; stretching further than it should, encompassing everything and nothing at all.
“Oh, thank God.” Simon whispers, though his voice travels anyway, and he is running before his mind can intervene. She should be an enemy, an antagonist that sealed the metal, spoke through the radio and never cared enough to learn his name; yet that is not the woman standing across from him. Her shoulders hunch forward, arms wrapped around her torso, and the first thing she said was his name.
She does not touch him, he does not reach for her. As much as he misses the comforting hands of Death, he does not reach for her.
“What the fuck is happening to us?” Ava mutters, exacerbation leaking through the syllables, coating the vowels and breaking her even breath. It takes them a moment to realise that they are not injured, that there is no bleeding, no breaks. But neither can answer the obvious.
What the fuck is happening to us?
“We got lucky.” He states plainly, because that’s what this is, a twist of fate that worked out in their favour. “Just fucking lucky.”
“You know, there's something weird about all this. Something that doesn’t add up.” she turns each word over as they leave her lips. She’s stating the obvious, they’re stood in the void, for fuck’s sake. “But.. I can’t help but want to think it's real.”
A sour laugh slips from Simon’s throat, though that’s not quite right. More of an astonished thing, than anything else.
“I can’t blame you, Captain.” He utters.
“Captain?” Beneath her widened eyes and the scarring, Ava cannot help but smile. Just a little.
“Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Captain Ava.”
In the darkness of the void, there are no birds to call, no lights to wander or eyes to see; but the floor comforts her as she sits. “I never got to say it before.. You know. But they never learned my name, either, just Captain.”
“No? That’s..”
“I could’ve been kinder to you, Simon.” Ava spills. “Could’ve been a damn sight kinder, because one fuck up and I’d have been right down there with you in that shitbag of a ship.”
“It’s not your fault,” he soothes, pulling shapeless breath into his lungs. “It’s this place. Punishes anything that isn't their picture perfect reality.”
“How about we go back and change it, then? I’m sure Death is sick of us just… sitting in her living room.” Ava pulls herself to her feet, brushing the dust from the COI’s regulation jacket. Beneath it is clothes she has made, fabrics stitched together with illegal thread, forged in cotton teeming with rebellion.
“Co-Captain has a better ring to it, don’t you think?”