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He’s still looking at you. Eyes wide. Hat slightly and charmingly askew. And you are in the same shuttle, hurtling towards space, waiting for the announcement to blare out again.
Waiting. Waiting. You always seem to be waiting. For the next murder. For the next discovery. For the tasks to be done. The next clue. The next accusation. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting .
But this time there is something different. You can’t put your finger on it. It’s evasive not in the way that a secret being kept from you is evasive, but in the way that a forgotten memory is evasive. It clings to the back of your brain. It lingers. It is aimless and purposeful at once.
And then.
He should be dead. He is dead. He died.
The thought is like a sudden breeze. There one moment. Gone the next. Forgotten like an old love is forgotten. Like old trauma is forgotten.
But he is still looking at you, and he is trembling, and something is wrong.
*
You killed him. You took his shoulder and dragged him out into the cold emptiness. He told you that he loved you and you -
The wire fizzes, and an alarm starts blaring. And you cannot remember what you were thinking as you let your feet carry you towards the sound. Towards the issue at hand.
You bump into him in the hallway, and he reels back from the impact of it. For a moment, as the alarms blare, you are just there, staring at each other. And his face is pale with some unspoken emotion, his eyes glassy with incomprehension.
It takes too long for you to notice his hands on your shoulders. Too long to notice that your hands are clutching his arms right back. Too much pressure. Why does it matter? Why are your knuckles pale with force, your breaths unsteady and trembling?
The alarms stop. Somewhere, someone has taken care of the system. But you are still staring at him, your chest aching, your gaze blurry with tears.
It takes too long for him to pull back, to return to his tasks. And then it’s just you. Your hand reaching after him, purposeless in the empty space. Something deep within you had wanted to hold on, had wanted to tug him closer and hide with him amongst the wires and the churning machines, away from the mess of it all in some tiny imperfect paradise of your own making.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong.
*
Emergency meeting. A body found in electrical. Somehow, you find yourself less affected than you’d expect.
This is the first time that you’ve seen a body. Isn’t it? You’d expected fear and disgust. Absolute horror at the sight of the blood staining the floors, the flesh torn right through and the exposed bones stained red. But you’d just felt -
Overcome with weariness. A sense of deja vu so strong it threatened to sweep you off your feet. You barely even acknowledge the body itself as your crewmates chat around you. Swapping theories and accusations, throwing around defences and evidence. Nobody looks at you. You were doing tasks at the time. Everyone saw it. You’re safe for now.
And then someone accuses him of the murder. And someone else perks up, looks up with a cold glint in their eyes and says “yeah, where were you”? And you realise that he, too, has been silent this whole time. But his eyes are calm and emotionless. His voice emotionless as he recounts his defence.
He meets the eyes of the other crewmates, one by one, as he explains. But he doesn’t look at you. And you are aching .
The vote is skipped.
You find you can finally breathe again.
*
You’re in electrical when he appears, face blank, movements careful. And you’re afraid, for a moment, before the stronger feeling of shame overcomes you, sweeps over you like a cosmic storm, like something all consuming.
You turn slowly. And you hope he didn’t see you flinch. And you offer him a smile, ephemeral and uncertain. But he doesn’t return it.
Why would he? You don’t deserve a smile from him anymore. Not after what happened.
You stare at each other, for a while, in that small room. And both of you are ignoring the blood stains around you. Signs of violence ingrained into the room itself like a curse.
Like a memory.
You finish your tasks. He seems to, too. And then you go your separate ways, like strangers - two ships passing in the endless night.
*
Another body. One of the other crewmates cries when they see the sight, all heaving breaths and trembling lips. And they’re looking around the room. Accusing. And none of them truly innocent. Not now. Not ever.
He looks at you, and there is fear in his eyes. And you- well, you-
You’d dragged him back from the table by his shoulders, and he’d been crying. But you felt nothing then, nothing but numb shock, dull terror dumbing your senses and driving icy coldness up the back of your spine.
“It’s not me,” he keeps sobbing, each hiccoughing breath like another nail in you. “Please, I need you to trust me. If you’ve ever cared about me. Please.”
He’s still crying as the airlock closes behind him, as the vacuum envelops him with all the care and hunger of a lover.
You stand there. And you watch him run out of air. His face paling behind the helmet. And you’d put him there. Had cast the deciding vote even as he’d looked at you with that impossible tenderness, even as memories of his palm against yours dominated your memory.
He hadn’t been the intruder. You should have known. But you’d doubted him enough to kill him. You’d trusted the intruder enough to kill him.
Nobody is innocent in this. Nobody will ever be. Maybe there was a reason that everyone here had been sent up here to face their deaths.
*
The vote is skipped. Your eyes are wet behind your helmet. Everyone returns to the tasks as though nothing has happened.
*
You run into him in the medbay this time. And he looks at you with those glassy eyes and does not speak for a long, long while.
“I just finished up here,” he finally says, voice hoarse. “I can stay, though.”
And you nod. You take three steps forwards and -
Collapse in tears because -
Here he is. Here he is. Alive. Breathing. But that’s impossible because you’d killed him, dragged him out into the endless darkness and shut the airlock after him. And it’s impossible because you’d died too, killed by the imposter only moments later. Everyone - everyone else here. Dead for your bad decisions.
But mostly him. Mostly him. At least nobody else had to suffer. They’d been dispatched quickly - you included. But you’d sent him out there yourself. Hands on his shoulders and fingers digging into his skin. And he’d suffocated. Drowned in space with his suit like an accusation against the endlessness of space.
He hadn’t even struggled. Said he didn’t want to hurt you. Didn’t want to hurt anyone - but especially you.
He hadn’t even struggled.
*
You’d told him that you loved him too, once, the your feet on the ground and your heart in your throat. You’d been so nervous, even more nervous than you’d been for the launch, but then he smiled at you and suddenly, it was the most natural thing in the world to take his hand in yours.
And you did - you did love him. Loved him as you dragged him into the darkness of space. Loved him as you watched the life ripped from him.
But the universe is dark and hungry. And the ability to trust had been stolen from you as soon as you’d left the stability of gravity. Stolen by that endless darkness and by the malevolence hanging heavy around you. Love without trust is nothing. Care without trust is nothing. Blood stained the spaceship as stubbornly as wine spilled on a plush carpet. Death haunted the halls.
It’s in places like these that your very humanity dies.
Nobody really survives the ship. You might as well hope that the intruder kills you first.
*
In the medbay. He falls to his knees by your side, and he, too, is shaking, his gloved hands trembling as he raises them to your shoulders, traces the line of your helmet.
“ I’m supposed to be dead.” You find yourself sobbing, leaning forwards as if in some desperate, useless attempt to seek comfort, the way a plant might curve towards the sun, desperate and longing. Like your life depends on it. On him. “I’m supposed to be dead.”
It’s a replacement for another sentence. It’s a replacement for ‘ I saw you die’. For ‘I killed you’ . For ‘sorry’ and ‘what now’ and ‘I love you’. But you can’t force yourself to say those things. Because he’s alive right now. Here and alive and breathing, with his hands on your shoulders. And speaking something makes it true. And you keep expecting him to fade away. Keep expecting to wake up yourself in a darkened room with the blood pumping hot and thick between your fingers and the icy coldness of space worming itself into your very bones.
And he doesn’t speak at all.
So you stand, still trembling. And your hands are still on his arms, some lonely echo of a long-gone memory.
“What’s happening to us?” You find the strength to finally ask, and it hangs for a moment between you. And in the question is the endless dark of space and a thousand deaths that have happened before. This endless cycle. This ceaseless hunger for death and trauma, for distrust and betrayal.
He doesn’t answer. Just pulls his hands from yours, the moment behind you now.
Something between you has been tainted.
You don’t even try to apologise as he walks out the door. You don’t ask if he could ever forgive you. You know that the answer is no, and will be. Weighed heavier and heavier with every cycle you have to live through. Made colder and colder with every bloodied body or every hiss of the airlock.
He’d loved you once, but that doesn’t seem to be enough anymore.