Work Text:
His mind wanders as he lies those slow eons in the wreckage, caught within the strife of Hoth’s howling cold against his own shocked fever. After the manner of the feverish, the images interpose and transpose themselves, bound only by the loose logic of dream. This bizarre dialectic leads to juxtapositions of memory at which he would laugh, could he draw enough breath: the carmine jumpsuits of Rogue Squadron with some pulpy red Nubian fruit his wife had once served to guests, Little Zev’s much-bitten stuffed eopie and that time Ensign Tetten put hot pepper in Ozzel’s caf and somehow got away with it. He supposes it is a mercy, not to have the clarity of thought to examine what must be happening to him, trapped agony of freezing atop shock and blood loss, and doesn’t that bit of frost look uncannily like a dahlia?
As the cold begins the first languorous balance of its victory dance and unconsciousness patiently gathers him up, the febrile lantern-show dims but does not go out. Many images dwindle down to two. Gone now the hope, almost always present at some level of his thought despite its inevitability, that Ozzel will someday soon make a complete fool of himself; the military virtue, polished to a high sheen and kept for a better day; the suspicion that he may have just won the most impossible battle of his career. Ideas fall into one another and disappear, cards being shuffled and dealt away.
The icy air is stinging his lungs with its bitterness. Variations upon two themes: Piett looking worried, which is to say, looking at all. Zevulun’s single dimple. That bloody-minded ballad he sang once under a forest of Petrovskian maple. His son, a nightmare-harried toddler, lulled asleep again in his arms.
Zevulun. Firmus.
My loves, I hope you know I loved you.