Chapter Text
The first time he woke up, it took him all of 20 seconds to get himself killed. It wasn’t really his fault, honest. The ground was made of dust and bones more than anything else, and the only thing that was not darkness, was the small light in the shape of a butterfly that he stumbled blindly towards. The thought of getting left in this place alone poured ice into his veins and robbed him of any thought that wasn’t focused on following the light as quickly as he could.
Perhaps if he was focusing at what the light was illuminating, insead of the light itself, he could’ve seen the pit before the mess of bones and dust underneath his feet slipped and dragged him over the edge for a moment of terrifying free fall and subsequent broken spine as he bounced off a piece of metal sticking out off the wall, but he wasn’t and paid the price. He never felt his body hit the floor.
There was a flash of light and then a pained yowl, as he found himself flailing around at enemies that weren’t there and managing to punch a wall in his panic. He clutched his injured hand to his chest and looked around wildly trying to figure out what happened.
No answers were forthcoming, only the steady light of the butterfly floating next to him. Its light seemed to almost leech the adrenalin from his veins, and he straightened up feeling somewhat calm for the first time.
He nodded to the butterfly that bobbed in the air like it was nodding back, and continued on into the darkness. He followed, slightly warier of the floor now, even if this one seemed more stable that the one he woke up on.
It seemed like an eternity that he spent in this place. The panic inside him bubbled again, as the darkness pressed around him, oppressive, and he wanted out out out.
A terrifying thought struck him then- what if this was it? What if the butterfly was the only light left?
No, surely, that’s not it.
The butterfly stopped in front of a wall, made a circle in the air to pull his attention to it and then bounced of the wall a few times. It didn’t take a genius to understand what it wanted.
Surely there’s something out there,
He leaned into the wall, feet scrambling for purchase on the floor, throwing up sand everywhere, until he found solid floor underneath and managed to truly push .
Something bright and beautiful,
The metal underneath his hands groaned in protest, and he closed his eyes, filled his lungs with the stale air and gave everything he had in him to a simple act of pushing.
Something that gives light and life to everything it touches,
The metal shifted with horrible noise and sand filled the air, and he barely registered he was yelling with exertion as the wall ever so slowly gave.
Something like…
With last roar he tipped the metal plate over, letting it crash into the ground outside and tilted his head towards the sky, towards…
The Sun.
Light cascaded down around him, and he spread his arms to welcome it, feeling it seeping throughout his body, down to his very bones. It felt warm, and wonderful and safe and he never wanted to leave.
He didn’t know how long he spent simply basking in the light before he noticed it. He frowned up at the sky, feeling of wrongness settling in his gut. He had no memory of ever looking up at a sky before, but there was something in him that knew… things. It knew about sun, but it also knew…
Sun isn’t supposed to look like that.
Instead of a bright smooth orb above him, there was a crack. Like sky was made of glass and someone put a bullet in it, except the bullet was light that then seeped into all the cracks it caused. He stretched his hands towards it and froze as it came into his field of view.
Human hand isn’t supposed to look like that either.
He could see his bones attached to each other by thin strings of flesh, looking like somebody tried to rebuild his body, but stopped about 20 percent in. He wanted to scream, to claw at his face, but all he could do was to stay still, paralyzed with terror, chest heaving as he stood there staring at his hand, too afraid to look down, for fear of what he might see.
It was just as his vision started to darken around the edges something brushed against his cheek and the butterfly fluttered into his field of view. Its light once again shooed his racing heart, and he watched as it landed on his outstretched hand. It stayed there for a moment, wings outstretched, like it too was basking in the light and he slowly brought it closer to his face, fascinated by the little creature. Now that he could look at it up close and in the light, he saw that only its main body actually glowed, its wings simply reflecting the light, being almost pure white, with patterns across them in gunmetal grey.
As he was looking at it, the butterfly’s light flared and flowed into him, quickly engulfing his whole arm in warmth that then moved to the rest of his body. He watched in shock as the light coalesced into fully formed muscles, that the second flare from the butterfly covered with skin and third with cloth.
The lightshow abated, leaving him kneeling in the sand, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. No answer materialized, the butterfly resuming its sunning like nothing happened so instead he gathered his courage and looked down to inspect himself.
The clothes the butterfly gifted him was the same beige color as the sand around him and covered him head to toe and were strangely cool despite the (not?) sun bearing down at him. Struck by a sudden desire to know what he looked like underneath that, he started pulling at the glove covering his other hand. It took some doing, as the suit didn’t seem to be designed to come off, but eventually he managed to take it off, with only a mild tearing.
The skin underneath was rich brown, and seemed to glitter underneath the light like there were stars trapped in it. It was as beautiful as it was odd.
The butterfly didn’t seem to share his opinion however and fluttered agitatedly in front of his face before landing on his uncovered hand and recreating the glove in a similar lighshow from before, leaving him with one extra glove in his other hand. He let go of it and watched as it disintegrated into motes of light before it even hit the ground.
He stared at them as they slowly winked out one by one, before shaking his head and finally looking around. As he already peripherally noticed he was in a desert, and as he looked around he realized that besides half buried spaceship behind him, that was pretty much it. Just desert as far as the eye could see.
Well, he wouldn't gain anything by staying here so he stood up, having fallen to his knees somewhere during his breakdown, picked a direction at random and started walking, gladly leaving the spaceship filled with darkness behind him.
The sand piled up in huge dunes all around him even more unstable and prone to shifting underneath his feet than the one in the spaceship, but even so he found walking easier. Somehow his body was lighter, more invigorated. Maybe it had something to do with him now possessing complete muscle structure, or maybe it was the light all around him, reflected back at him from the sand, or maybe something completely different, but the point stood that even as he walked faster and faster upwards a steep dune he didn’t feel any fatigue. Soon he found himself going from speed walking to light jogging. Then to running. Then to sprinting. His breathing sped up as his feet pounded into the ground faster and faster, but his body didn’t seem to get tired. In fact, the more he ran, the more he felt as if he was truly waking up for the first time.
He crested one dune, tripped on nothing, and tumbled down the other side. With next one he managed to get all his limbs under control for long enough to slide down. As he was cresting another one something seemed to awaken within him and instead of continuing to fight against ever-shifting sand he jumped. However instead of a simple jump, his body seemingly with mind of his own leaped . His body twirled in the air, guided by foreign instincts, and he suddenly found himself half a dozen meters in the air, looking at the desert stretching out below him for a frozen moment, before the gravity remembered his existence and he plummeted down to earth.
He landed in a cloud of dust, without even a twinge of pain from falling from such height and he felt laughter bubbling in his throat. He looked back the way he came and saw a mote of light streaking towards him. The butterfly.
He extended his hands toward it and it tickled his palm with its wings before circling around his head exitedly. Something in his head told him that butterfly shouldn't be able to fly so fast, but then again- that something seem to be wrong about more things than it was right. In some ways that fact was mildly terrifying, but in others it was oddly freeing.
Blank slate. Something in his mind whispered.
Yeah . He thought looking over seemingly infinite plain of sand around him. That seems about right.
That was when he heard shooting.
He was taking cover behind the dune he was standing on before his conscious mind even identified the sound, but even that caught on quick.
No shots landed near him, and he didn’t see anybody in the apex of his jump, and it didn’t sound like a sniper rifle either, so the shots most likely weren’t aimed at him. The question then was: at who?
He pulled his legs underneath him and sprang into the air, even higher now than before. Nothing again, unsurprising given how tall the dunes around him were.
He landed again and looked over to the butterfly that was hanging in the air at his eye level, somehow managing to look expectantly while being barely a centimeter long. That was all he needed.
He leaped over the dunes in the direction of the gunfire, like a bullet. Something in him whispered how foolish it was to race into a conflict he knew nothing about, unarmed and unarmored, but he shut it away. It has already been wrong about so many things, he wasn’t about to go listening to it again. Especially not with strangely alluring barking of guns getting closer every leap.
He burst into the battlefield in a cloud of sand, and used the half a second of cover it gave him to analyze the situation.
To his right there was an overturned vehicle with a couple of people hiding behind it clutching guns in their hands, and to his left taking cover behind a low dune were…
Aliens.
He hit the ground, rolled, and immediately sprang forward towards the aliens. He had no weapon only speed and surprise on his side. He would have to move fast.
Two of the aliens swung his guns towards him, leaving only one of them to lay down covering fire towards humans. He only barely managed to touch the ground and dart perpendicular to the aliens on his next leap, before the the space he occupied milliseconds before was filled with streaks of plasma.
He zig-zagged towards the aliens keeping low to the ground, feeling the plasma whiz by him. The aliens yelled something unintelligible, and then he was in range.
He kicked off towards the big one, and latched onto his gun. The last alien aimed at him, but couldn't shoot without risking hitting his own ally. The big alien swung his weapon around trying to dislodge him, but he wrapped his arm fully around the gun and used his other hand to claw at the alien’s faceplate.
He just managed to hook fingers underneath the edge, when something grabbed his body with a crushing force and threw him away from the alien. He hit the ground and desperately rolled to the side as he heard more gunfire, but he wasn't fast enough and his side lit up with pain.
Somehow he managed to jump to his feet and just as his vision cleared he found himself looking down the barrel of the alien gun. Next thing he knew most of his brain was replaced by white hot plasma.
There was a brief moment of darkness, before, suddenly he was awake again, the butterfly fluttering away from his face. Before he could even process what happened his body leaped up on its own accord, and the ground below him was being melted into glass.
He landed near the third alien suppressing the humans that scrambled away and swung its gun towards him. Before it could press the trigger however, a stream of bullets thudded against the back of its helmet throwing it forward. It wasn’t dead, merely stunned for a moment, but that was all he needed. He dashed forward, more plazma from the other two aliens trailing after him, and snatched the alien’s gun from its hands.
Something in his head, the same something that insisted that the thing in the sky wasn’t a sun, told him that the gun he was holding was too alien for him to know how to use, but at the same time the instinct that showed him how to leap guided his hands to correct places and he finished off the stunned alien as he was leaping above it.
He touched down on the other side of the dune, gaining some much needed breathing space, and dashed around to come at the remaining aliens from the side. He was already pressing down the trigger when they came back into his line of sight.
The smaller alien jumped away from his shots, but the bigger one simply braced himself and returned fire. He avoided the shots, but then the smaller alien joined in and cut off his avenue of escape. He was forced to jump into the air, and he watched as the alien aimed right at him before getting a face full of glowing butterfly.
The alien jerked back swatting at butterfly. It recovered quickly, but by that time he was already right in front of him, pumping his chest full of plazma. He yanked its gun out of its hands and put its body between him and the last alien. He sent a torrent of plazma towards it and it reciprocated sending him once again plummeting into darkness before he was yanked back into the light.
He threw the now gibbed corpse of alien off him aiming his gun back at the big one in the same motion. It was wounded, he noticed, clutching at wounds in its midsection. It tried to level its gun back at him, but before it could, he already crossed the distance separating them, pressed the barrel of his gun into its faceplate and pumped the rest of the magazine into his head.
The silence that descended then seemed almost unnatural compared to the chaos of last few moments. He looked around at the aliens’ corpses to make sure none of them managed to somehow survive, and when they didn’t stir he breathed a sigh of relief and bendt down to inspect them more fully.
He didn’t really had time to notice anything about them during the fighting, his mind lazer focused on their guns and where they were pointing them, but now he could finally look them over. The first thing he noticed was that these aliens had 6 limbs instead of 4. The upper ones served as hands with the lower two pairs being stacked almost on top of each other and serving as legs, but with the ones in the middle looking like they could be used as additional pair of hands in a pinch. Those must be what the big guy used to throw him away the first time.
Any more details of their bodies was concealed by dull metallic armor in various shades of sand, without any additional decoration or even indication of rank that he could see.
He walked over to the first alien and pried of its helmet. Inside was what looked like a wolf’s head if you turned it on it’s side, mirrored it’s upper part, and instead of fur covered it with spines. It wasn’t actually as ugly as he was half expecting.
He shook those idle thoughts away and quickly stripped the aliens of their ammo, trusting the foreign light in his head to guide him in reloading weapons and slipping the rest of the magazines? Is that what they were called when dealing with plasma weapons? Either way he slipped them into the various pouches on his clothes, that seemed to also get repaired when he came back from the dead.
Huh. That’s right he did that. He didn’t really registered it during the combat, or back on the ship, where he was too desperate to get out to think about anything at all, but now it crashed down on him. He came back from the dead. Multiple times in fact. That… wasn’t normal. Was it?
His instincts churned in his head, half of them telling him that, no this wasn’t normal and that he should be freaking out about it right now, and the other half telling him that, of course this was all absolutely normal. After all he just did it twice in a quick succession and didn’t even feel any different, right?
The butterfly landed on his shoulder and he reached out to them, transferred them to his hand and lifted them up in front of his face to inspect them. Thankfully they didn’t seem to be hurt by their kamikaze stunt with the second alien, which he was grateful for. One thing he was certain of was that the butterfly had something to do with his inexplicable immortality, even if he didn’t know how exactly.
Who are you? He thought towards them turning his hand around to inspect them from all angles. What do you have to do with all this?
The butterfly simply spread their wings and continued to bask in the sun(?)light. He sighted smiling wryly at them and transferred them back to his shoulder.
He carefully peaked over the dune, to inspect the humans he just assisted. He saw one of them peaking curiously over their improvised cover, before being pulled down by one of their companions.
The glint of a rifle made him instinctively duck behind cover too, before he realized that... that wasn’t necessary for him was it? Even if he was shot he’d just come back almost immediately, no? And he’d get to fight some more as a bonus.
With that thought he stood up and strutted down the dune towards humans with confidence of a newly born immortal.