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Spaceboy peeled off the corner of his Saiyan Samurai Brawl poster and discovered the darkest void he’s ever seen underneath. He stuck his hand in the space to affirm that it was a hole and not a wipe of pure black pigment. Then he smoothed the corner of the poster back and affixed it to the wall with tape. There. Problem solved. No more hole.
And then, after a gander around with his hands on his hips, he scratched the tape off and peeled the corner back again. It was still there. That inexplicable, senseless darkness set behind a stupid gamer poster in his bedroom wall.
Stars, he thought. I am going to do jack shit about this. He didn’t patch up holes--he’s a captain, not a caulker--but he doubted holes like these could be patched up anyway. He touched the spot above where his heart had been. Yeah.
It wasn’t his first flirt with that darker-than-black substance--he’s been to the edge of space where the starry void became starless and the rules of the world flickered sporadically. Went until his ship’s inertia glitched out and then tethered himself to the craft and prayed the fibers in the line wouldn’t spontaneously decay on him.
Floated out of the dark, opened an eye and found himself in a dark-haired boy’s bedroom with a pink sunrise bleeding through the blinds and air crisper than ice. Wondered what that was about for only a slice of a moment before zipping back, flipping, and flying out; the crew were getting real antsy, Dex’s premonitory knees began hurting, all that. Couldn't stay.
Not like the dark scares him--or, well, he’s got higher concerns. Such as his anemic descent into corpsehood. A dude can only survive without a vital organ for a while.
When he saw the dark again, he shot it.
What else was he supposed to do? Man’s just having a nice lunch scroll down the promenade of his ship for the first time in a long while, letting the rays of the binary stars batter him, warming both his front and his back and disintegrating any hint of shadow. And when he glanced up from his sandwich, this twenty-foot-long dark serpent with one slitted eye loomed like a living, wriggling citadel at the bow of his ship.
And blam. The sandwich hit the ground and the blaster purred in his hands because he had already shot before he thought--because he’s a space pirate and alien creatures didn’t know of any prisoner’s dilemmas or moral-social-psycho-whatever axioms like that, not that he was the kind of dude who cares about that shit anyway. Out here it was shoot-before-questions; that’s what it’s about and that’s all he needed to wrap his head around.
Except it wasn’t, this time. He had shot the blast--maybe two shots, maybe three; he could taste the plasma residue in the back of his throat and his vision throbbed with afterimage. But still the creature stared with an eye so dark it made the whites around it bright enough to hurt.
The creature was completely unfazed.
Had he missed? He never missed. His finger poised itself on the trigger again.
But the creature interrupted him with a trill like grating machinery.
“Whoa, five second rule,” it vibrated. “Here.”
A tendril of dark swept the barrel of his gun aside and brought his sandwich to his hands. He took it. Above him, the eye continued to watch him, unblinking. Its shadow leaned from the edge of the ship, until he looked downward again, and it was not there anymore. And he looked up and met nothing but a blank sky with the faint prickles of stars, as if he had hallucinated the entire exchange.
His gun was cold.
Back in his quarters, he exhausted most of a black pen drawing the cyclops shadow serpent from memory, as he did with most of the large beasts he came across, in case they ever met again.
And again they did. A smaller version, three-pronged, flitted at the edges of his vision, appearing in doorways and mirrors. He still wasn’t sure if he dreamed it up, considering he saw it when his grip on reality was the weakest--such as when he stood up too fast and the blood bottomed out from his brain.
Or as he came out of dreams, it hung in the corner of his room, watching him in the transitional muck between eyelids and bedroom--but dissipating into cold fog when he woke fully.
He’s up right now, nights later, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and watching the monster flick through the pages of his logbook. Its eye twitches and trains on him. He freezes.
“Ah, sorry. I thought you... “ it says. Stars, what’s with that voice? It’s like a voice sample run through seven layers of reverb and warble. “You mind?”
“Nah, it’s not like my diary or anything. Not that I--not that I have one,” he lied. His hand reaches for the gun leaned behind him on the wall.
“Mm. You’re a decent artist. This one’s cool.” It--no, she--no, no. It nudges the book into a spot of red light reflected from a nearby moon. “The, let’s see, it looks like a sheep of some sort. And… don’t bother with the gun. I won’t hurt you.”
Or, he can’t hurt it. His fingers only tighten on the grip. “Uh huh.” He watches her--it. He watches it muse over his various drawings while his frail heart accelerates. Barring when he’s shitfaced on engine vapours or alone in an empty spaceport, this is one of his weirder moods. The air is crisp and his hands feel outlined against the rest of the world except for the, uh, the she-it--like he were a sketch in his logbook and his room were the faint college-ruled lines behind. Feels too lucid to be reality. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
The she-it doesn’t look up. “Go on.”
“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
“Depends.”
“Okay.” He breathes deep and shivers. Yeah, he’s dreaming. This is nice, actually; it’s a welcome change from the dreams of his ex-wife clopping away on those little pink heels after airing every grievance she’s had with him from the way he took too long gelling his hair in the bathroom to the piglike way he snorts when he laughs to the way he cried for her to come home after long nights of noodling with a sea of sprout mole lovers and an ocean of their wannabes. Or, oh horrible stars, the dreams of their wedding, or their first date, or those times when they’d climb the ivy-clad towers of her castle and watch the constellations align for their love. The happiest dreams were the worst. “Could I ask another question?”
It nods.
“Could you come back tomorrow night?”
It shuts the book and cocks its head. Something about that movement… “Really? I was afraid I was intruding.”
“It’s fine. It’s better than… the other dreams I’ve been having.”
His pulse is raging but muffled like distant thunder.
She blinks and a tremor runs through her form. “...I suppose I could stay.”
“Alright.”
“Mm.”
He sinks back into the covers again and through half-lidded eyes watches her draw herself onto his chair and read his book.
“I’ve met one of you before, you know?”
“Have you?”
“Dream djinns. Oneiro aliens, call them whatever. Funny story, actually. He told me he was a weapons dealer--or, I mean, yeah he technically was--so I bought a gun from him for a couple ‘a clams… but I could only use it in the dream? Like, I woke up and it wasn’t there. Screwed up, ‘specially considering I used my clams from real life. Worst purchase ever.”
Man, he’s chatty right now, sleepiness slurring his words a little too. But it’s alright. It’s a dream, after all.
“That’s what you think I am?”
“Then what are you?”
A sourceless wind tousles her form, and for a moment he sees she’s made of thick waterfalls of hair, with something slight hidden underneath. “The god of this world has a sister, and I am her shadow. Since that god is gone… by primogeniture I’m god, I suppose.”
“That’s crazy.” Only one other entity shares her darkness. “You talking about the kid with the knife? I didn't know there were three of you. There's also the picnic chick, right?”
“No. What? That is me. Somewhat--it's like a holy trinity thing. She's the part that has the picnics and I have to be creepy and hang out behind people's shower curtains.”
“That’s not fair. Don't you wanna have picnics too?”
“...I do. That's not my purpose, though.”
“Purpose?”
“If you want I can explain it to you, but… “ she catches herself, “I’ll put it simply for now. I’m a guardian angel.”
He raises his head from his pillow. “An angel? You’re a hair monster.”
“Look again.” Another sourceless gale pours through the room. It brushes his own bangs into his eyes but lifts the hair covering the she-it slightly off of her, so that if he looks very intently, he can see it. The outline of a girl’s face, barely visible against the dark, dark-on-dark, dark superimposed onto dark to create an eye-searing megadark. But it’s there, the silhouette, trailing slender arms into long, bony fingers that then dissolve into tendrils of hair.
“My stars, you’re...” He loathes his next words too much to speak them. But if she could sense the flow of its blood, she wouldn’t need him to say it at all.
A laugh. “I know, right?”
That's all he remembers. The rustles of paper sing him to sleep, or wake, or whatever is in between dreams. When he wakes for real, the book is untouched and the chair in its position. He remembers that which he considers a dream for a considerably longer time than most his other dreams, but chalks it up to djinn influence.
In the afternoon, he changes the bandages over the hole where his heart was. It’s been a long time, but the wound’s still fresh, with none of the swelling and itching of cells about to heal; if he presses too hard on the wrong spot, blood oozes out and drips down his chest. Lots of scars on his torso. He never thought he’d end up wishing for another one so badly.
He watched a movie, once, about a dream within a dream within a dream and the badass spies that waged war in those waters. A little spinning top tied their lives to reality. A similarly beautiful metal thing sits warmly in his wound.
He hunts comet angelfish with Dex and Piglet--until he starts shivering so hard he can’t shoot straight. Picking up the phone after dinner, his fingers fly autopilot to Sweetheart’s contact--saved as “jfd,” stands for jelly-filled donut, appended with a conga line of humiliating heart emojis--and before he can click, he lobs it at the couch across the room and drops his head in his hands.
But he ends up calling her anyway, like the dumbass he is. All ship and no brain, that's what his boys tell him he is when he forgets to turn the stove off. Goes straight to her receptionist; gets a “we’ll tell her you said hi” and nothing more. Doesn’t even have to put on a red nose and wig for that interaction.
That night, the she-it guardian angel hair monster visits him again, bringing her crisp edges and shimmering air to his room. She plays his keyboard in exchange for stories about her travels, a mental salve to help him wake up feeling less like shit and more like some less noxious form of excrement. Like sweat, or tears, or eggs or something. It’s nice. He wakes up missing it.
All the while, the days grow redundant. Float in space. Hang out with the boys. Change the bandages over his heart; try to get the foreign object in the wound out and end up with failure and blood-slicked hands. Almost pass out from blood loss--seriously, he’s onto his last liter or something. Reach some torturous stalemate with Sweetheart where she promises to see him soon and the tone of her voice, though sugary, puts a lump in his throat and bile in his ribcage because he can hear the jingles for that stupid dating contest show crackling in the back.
“So we’re all dream constructs?” He rearranges the blankets around him, laying his head back on his hands. It’s been, what, weeks? They’ve got a good rapport going, him and the hair monster, but there’s questions he’s been afraid to ask and fuck it, he’s just asked them. Y’know about the nature of the universe, et cetera. “Dude, that’s a real yarn… ”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Who would? This is some existential crackpot if I ever heard it.”
She coils around the keyboard bench. Her current chord ends in a playful slam. Kinda mesmerizing how her hair tentacles split into five, six, seven fingers to scuttle around the keys. “You forget that I am god.”
“According to you. You also think we’re walking metaphors or, like, similes, so--”
“Symbols.”
“Argh, same thing. Look, I’m a pirate, not a writer. Point is, this is nuts. I mean, what can living, walking people even symbolize?”
“I’m the guilt and sorrow he feels of his sister’s death. And you’re… “
“Oh, shit, lemme guess: everything he wanted to be. Ultra Guy. Coolest dude in existence.”
She laughs like a dishwasher full of silver spoons. “Actually. There was some idolization involved with your original concept, yes. Which is why you’re so,” a flippant gesture at his sprawled form on the bed, “ahem, cool. Objectively. But you’re not him. You’re you. And what you represent is--well, this is more conjecture than anything--it’s heartbreak.”
“Wait, what?”
The beautiful metal object throbs in the hole where his heart was. He’s not sure he wants to hear this.
“How do I explain… It’s why we never change.”
“Whaddya mean we don’t change? I got a haircut, like, last week.”
“To the exact same cut you’ve had for years now, dummy. Er, don’t change it, though. It suits you. On that note, and I promise this will make things make a bit more sense--have you noticed you look exactly like Hero?”
“That guy? Oh, that’s rich. I don’t know what she sees in that idiot. He looks like he’s wearing pajamas.”
“That is the point. Those are his pajamas.”
“Oh. Uh, well. Okay, his skin is all pasty and not blue.”
“And?”
“Okay, look. I didn’t actually fight him, so I don’t really remember what he looks like--besides, I mean, he’s not ugly . He usually just stays in the back and cooks the rest of them food.”
She laughs. “That sounds like him, alright. I have a picture if you’d like to see.” She reaches into the mass of hair and void and extracts a folded photo flaking at the edges and in the folds; drops it in his lap.
He smiles in this picture. He stands by a kitchen window and laughs with the sunlight glinting off his hair like halos, speaking to someone, baking a cake? The edge of the photograph is torn. The other half of the picture, whoever it held, is gone, and the borders are soft, as if traced by millions of forlorn fingertips.
“No, see, that’s not me. Look. His ears are all round and… his skin is pinkish and sort of brown here and his…”
“What about the features themselves? Like the shape of your nose, that stuff.”
He can see the resemblance, but it’s too odd for him to accept. The strong brows. The sharp nose. It’s all there, but that’s… why would that be?
“I sorta see it. We could be brothers? But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Go to the bathroom and have another look in the mirror.”
Even before he turns the lights on, he knows it as sure as his navigational star charts. He is the spitting image. He’s Hero, with the colors shifted, the features slightly more elfen.. No. No. Hero’s him, but with ruddy human bluntness and two eyes instead of one.
“What…” he whispers. “Why didn’t I…”
“Why didn’t you notice before?” And the she-it materializes from the shadows beside him. “You’re not supposed to, unless someone points it out to you. Or else things start getting a little wacky. My brother doesn’t like it when you people get too self-aware.”
“Wait.” He remembers the dead fish eyes of that boy-god and jerks his head up. “Wait, what is he--”
“No. He’s gone. He’s not coming back.”
“Thank the stars.”
“The photo, please.” She holds a tendril of hair out. “I’ll have it back.”
“Could I…” swallowing, “look at it a bit more?”
Another uncanny head-tilt. “Sure.”
Though it’s only paper in his hand, it feels just as heavy as the shrapnel in his heart. Something about the light bleeding from that window. Something about the boy’s smile. Everything around him is tissue paper compared to this photograph, when he’s sure old photos are supposed to have the opposite effect.
“Thank you.” He parts with it, and it disintegrates a second before it would’ve slipped into her curtain of hair. Despawns. He’s probably never seeing it again, but it’s okay because he can’t forget what it looks like even if he tries. It’s seared into his stupid pirate noggin right there next to engine manuals and the lyrics of sappy piano ballads. “Were you two in love?”
“No. Well… yes and no. I don’t know him, and I’ve never spoken to him. But I know who he is and how important his counterpart was to my counterpart. They were in love.”
“What happened? Did he divorce you too?”
“No! I mean, no, remember that I don’t know this guy. The person I… take after… does. Well, did.” She stares forward. “And then she died.”
“Oh. Tragic.”
“Yup.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing. I don’t really feel too much about it. I never knew him, personally.”
“So why am I… heartbreak?”
“My brother doesn’t get out that often. Doesn’t know a lot of people. So what his sister and Hero had… that was it, for him. That was love in the real. The epitome of it. Until she died, and then he witnessed what it’s like to lose it. Your anguish, your fury, the hole where your heart is and what you put in it… it’s all there so he can process it. What he did to you--that is, what he did to Hero. Your broken heart is the realest thing about you.”
“Huh?” His clammy hands find no relief on the coolness of the granite counter. He shakes his head. “What? That can’t be it. I’m dreaming. You’re not--you’re not saying anything worth anything. I’m dreaming you up--how would you know about my heart condition?”
Her voice grows icy. “This is also why you can’t escape her. Why that ring won’t come out no matter how much effort you put in cutting it away. It’s the only way my brother can give you the same pain that Hero endured. Sweetheart has to be her special brand of shit.”
“Shut up. Shut up. This isn’t fun anymore.” He runs a hand through his hair. In the mirror, a familiar figure with the face of a stranger stares back, and he is alone. “I wanna wake up. This isn’t real.”
“And,” he says, turning back. “Don’t talk about my girl like that. We’re still going strong.”
“You’re--what?--She put you in a dungeon , you, my god---”
She winds a tendril around his elbow--it’s soft, sinuous; makes him grow dizzy and warm despite her chill--but he shakes it off. He shakes, period, the epicenter being the rattling metal in his chest. “Stop. Please. This can’t be… I want to wake up.” His eyes swell and burn. “Wake me up.”
“Spaceboy. Listen--”
“We’re soulmates,” he says, while, in this crisp haze of her presence, he yearns for the touch on his elbow again. “That’s what she told me.” When he took her to his secret jungle moon full of waterfalls and lilies and told her he loved her for the first time. There’s no way, no way , that he’s built to be the vessel for a broken heart. There’s so much he wants. So much anime for them to watch together. So many virgin planets to traipse through. So much endless space for their love to bloom in.
“Soulmates,” he spits, “Not your redshifted heartbroken Hero expy. That’s what I was meant to be. And you were meant to haunt someone else, not me, so stop bothering me.”
Her eye widens. “I can help you. I can take it out--that’s something I--”
“Shut up,” he whispers. He’s about to fade into the distance and be swept away by a gust of solar wind, like comet dust, the way his body tingles at the edges. “Please.”
And he wakes to nebula light, clutching a damp palm in the bled-through fabric over his heart. He blinks in the white glow and shakes his head, as if the residues of that nightmare would fall from his hair like lice.
“Hey, Cap, what’s with the piano music you’ve been playing in the middle of the night? Me and Dex didn’t wanna bring it up ‘cause, you know, sometimes a mate likes Mozart. No shame in it.
… What? Why’re you looking at me funny?”
He doesn’t call himself haunted, but knowing his dreams weren’t dreams changes something.
Sweetheart calls. He watches her face with that smile of ingenue teeth and studio whiteness throb on his phone screen, and he merely watches . Listens to his custom mixtape ringtone run through once, twice. His first mate hollering a “she’s calling, boss,” and his half-hearted “yeah” in response. Taps his fingertips on the table.
Decides he’s done. Not forever, just for now.
He presses decline.
True dreams are crafted from tissue paper, substanceless, dissolving in water and doubly so in stomach acid. The she-it, despite her phantasmagoric airs, is now realer than a lot of things in his life, including those scratch-and-sniff cotton candy memories of his time with Sweetheart.
The man in the bathroom mirror bears Hero’s face, but with bloodless cheeks and dark undereyes. Soulmate or heartache? Two things he can be, really, long as that thing’s in his chest.
This has been a long time coming, really. A gush of blood when he digs his fingers in, clenching his teeth against the pain, toes curled against the bathroom mat, ass on the toilet lid. The flesh squirms against his fingers, attempting to beat. Deep inside, the edge of something hot and hard and smooth, too slippery to extract with a thick finger.
“Fuck,” he exhales. He pours rubbing alcohol on scissors and stuffs the hem of his cape in his mouth, sweeping the rest of the fabric over his shoulder. The wound drools rivulets of blood down his chest as he snips away obstructing flaps of tissue. It’d hurt more, but a shattered heart is, first and foremost, insensate. Self-numbing. The flesh around it isn’t though, which accounts for the fever dew gathering on his forehead.
He tries again to extract the object, but the wound can fit only his finger and thumb, both of which lose all traction when coated with blood. Tweezers don’t work either. He shines a flashlight at it and attempts to angle a mirror to look inside. Pulsing sinew deep in the wound has grown over and around the object, twisting, twining around its edges, attaching itself like leech suckers to its smooth surface. It’s not coming out, not unless he opens his entire ribcage and shreds what’s left of that heart of his.
The scissors drop from his slick hands and clatter on the tile. He leans back, wipes the sweatslicked hair from his brow--no doubt smearing some of the gore across it--and gazes with unfocused eyes at the ceiling.
Even so, he can’t go on like this. What’ll he do, walk out of the bathroom dribbling with his own blood and rifle through the cabinets for a clean roll of bandages? As if.
“I don’t know your name,” he says to the spots of black dancing across his vision. “But I know you’re listening. I kinda--I kinda… I need your help here.”
For a single moment, nothing happens, and he makes detailed plans to hit up the Party City at the nearest interstellar marketplace for clown-related vestments.
“Ouch.” A familiar girlish warble sounds from besides him, accompanied by a spot of black expanding to become a three-pronged shadow in his peripheral. “This is a mess.”
“No shit.” Her chill lifts sweat from his torso. “Listen, I’m sorry for, for uh, I freaked out. I’m really--”
“Shh.” She glides forward and lowers her eye to peer at his chest. Some of her hair drapes upon his stomach, soothing and cool, drawing from him a long exhale. Strange, how it undulates to the cadences of her speech. ”You’ve done pretty well with what you had. I can take it from here. Don’t move too much. And, uh.” The cape is stuffed again into his mouth. “Just in case.”
She reaches into him with a tendril which splits into several branches, then branches from those branches, exploring the mess he’s made of the entire cavity. “Feels like worms,” he tries to say through the rag.
“Ah, found it.” A cold tendril hooks around the object and he gasps. “Sorry. Does it hurt?”
“Keep going,” he forces out. “Get it over and done with.”
She peels and tugs and twists, and all the while he’s clenching his eyes shut like he’s getting a wisdom tooth yanked out. She leans closer, filtering the light from the ceiling lamp with curtains and curtains of hair, creating a dark tent of lily-smelling arctic air. In this haze, and from between the eyelashes of his squinted eyes, he traces the ghostly outline of her silhouette. Maybe it's the bloodloss, but he thinks she’s got some kind of inky tongue stuck out in concentration. Cute as hell, actually.
Some of the tugging in his wound releases. “Whoa,” she says. “It let go a bit. How did you do that?”
He shrugs and hopes he was flushed enough when this all started to disguise his heated cheeks now.
“It’s not coming out unless it wants to, I think.” The large eye stares down at him, flicks across his face. “If my thoughts are correct…”
She leans down further; takes the cape from his mouth. Her waves oscillate with quick energy. “I’m sorry, Spaceboy, but I have an idea. Um, it might be a little weird for you to hear, but you… agh, I don’t want to make it weird. But it’s a good shot, and--”
“Hurry up and--and get on with it before I bleed to death,” he grumbles. “Here.” He reaches up for a fistful of hair, endless hair, no scalp to be found, closes his eyes, and leans. And keeps leaning, and leaning, until he reaches a mouth. He opens his eyes a crack to pure darkness, but the sensation of lips nestled against his is real. Sweetheart once told him no one but her would ever love him. And that was destiny, to him, then. He doesn't know what it is now, or if it even matters.
“Your heart’s beating so fast,” she speaks against the corner of his mouth, through her hair, her voice coming from all directions at once. “It's letting go.”
A surge of--he doesn't know what it is, embarrassment? Excitement? ...Hope?--pushes through him and he kisses her once more, with fervor, letting her bassy hums distract him from the tug-of-war in his ribcage. His chin is tilted upwards by something soft and fibrous, and--
She breaks the kiss with a gasp and jerks back, as if singed. He’s in his bathroom again.
“Hey,” he protests, before he’s aware of the lightness in his chest. Something has come loose. All he feels is a weak rhythm synced to the ooze of blood down his chest.
“I got it out.”
She brings a golden ring to his face. His engagement band, still dripping with his blood.
“Stars,” he says, breathing deeply. “So that's that?”
She presses a roll of bandages into his dirty palms. “That's that. You can patch yourself up?”
“Yeah, yeah. Just,” he smoothes back his bangs, “I need a moment. I'm gonna pass out.”
“You're such a drama queen. You didn't even lose that much blood.”
“It's not the--okay, whatever. If you say so.”
A silence, punctuated by liquid dripping onto tile and his labored breaths.
“You just gonna stare at me?”
“Would you like me to leave?”
“...No.” Never , he almost says, but even his clownery knows limits.
“Then I'll stay.”
“Yeah.”
“About the… “
“Are we really getting into that right now?”
“I don't see why not.”
“Fine. Okay, what was that?”
She pauses and wobbles like pond water disturbed by a falling leaf. “Nothing, for now. Not now. Heal up and… and then we'll talk.”
And he could have sworn that something was left behind in that hole, dark and thin and long, suturing the ruins of his heart together, slowly spreading. Taking his hand, she presses his fingers to his neck. "Feel," she says. Already, his pulse grows stronger with every beat. The engine of starship after a long winter encrusted with ice, preparing to take to the skies.