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Blood coats the navigation seat of the ISS Saragossa. It covers the deck in front of it, and the railing that sits behind it, broken and bent and ending in steel gashes. The majority of it is dry, but there's a still-wet pool of deep fuchsia that stains the floor right in front of the footrest.
Your name is KADMOS HALLEY, and you wipe the blood off your glasses and hold a corpse in your arms.
It's reverent, but it barely constitutes for an embrace. The way you cradle his – its head to your chest screams compassion, the way you absentmindedly caress its shoulder, the way you tuck the crook of your elbow beneath the bend of its knee to support. He used to squirm when you did this. You're a little too bony in some places, and in others, your muscles are too firm to be comfortable. He ragdolls now.
Not 'he,' wait. You mean 'it.'
Your boots, dirty with a mud-hued mix of the entire spectrum, makes tracks along the ship's once-sterile metal floors. The only other sounds besides the thunk of your steps are the dull hum of the engines, vibrating beneath you. You take steps. Steps. Steps. Stepping over fallen debris, dodging exposed wires. Something sparks in the corner of the botany unit's supply closet, but you can't be bothered to check on it. Something drips from the walls. You don't know if it's blood or oil.
The corridor is a warzone. As you make your way down to the disposal bay, you duck beneath hanging pipes and ignore the two inches of liquid coolant flooding. There are gash marks in the walls in groups of three and bullet holes on the ceiling. A large dent to the left of the entrance of the culinary ward. You recall that it was your steward. Shattered horns. Did that hurt? Something sickening fills your stomach.
You make the mistake of looking into the kitchen.
The clear door to the freezer has blood splatters on it. Everything does, at this point; that isn't a surprise. What still pains you is the severed limb hanging from one of the shelves, and the body lacking a left arm laying on the shelf below it. You don't dare make eye contact, and swiftly look to the side to avoid it, but you're met with the glassy scleras of a body slumped against a metal cupboard. A dented pan sits above it. You had eggs for breakfast. You remember barely being able to swallow.
Foolishly, you wonder if it hurt. Who are you kidding, of course it hurt. It hurts when you get your head slammed against the wall, and when you get your forearm smashed against the edge of a surface. You heard the crack yourself and the scream that followed, and the vibrancy of the blood dripping from an open wound. Blood, always a constant. The ship reeks of it, painted in the full spectrum. You realized at that moment that no matter the color, everyone bleeds.
That's enough. You adjust your glasses by nodding your head upwards, lift the corpse a little higher, steadying yourself, and turn a corner.
The floors are dirty. You need to mop all of this up later, and rig the toilets to the water filtration system so you don't run out. Then, you need to look up how to repair the leak in the coolant, and reteach yourself how to weld so you can fix these damn pipes. The dishes need to be done, as well, and you need to ensure that the stoves still work. If not, you need to visit electrical and check that no fuses have blown out. Then you need to message moirails and matesprits and kismeses from back home, because the Department sure as hell won't do it, and then send logs to home base. You're horribly out of date; hopefully someone on planet was keeping track of things in your absence. What are you having for dinner? You've always wanted to try the fried tofu that he had on Wednesdays.
You step over someone's leg – something's leg, and remind yourself that disposal is right on the other side of that door.
You hold your eye up to the retina scanner and the interface spins while the doors open. The disposal bay is cold and untouched, the only clean area in the entirety of the ship. Granted, the ventilation makes it smell like blood, and the fans sound a little fucked up, but otherwise, it's pristine. Nobody ever liked being in here before; garbage duties were resented, despised, to the point where there was a vote on whether or not everyone should throw away their own waste, but out of some kind of sadism and general laziness – not to say that your crew was lazy, God knows they worked to the bone – everyone voted against it. You smile at the memory, but quickly drop your expression. You can't get carried away now.
You approach the long table that leads out to the garbage disposal. It doesn't crunch, nor incinerate, nor mutilate, so you're glad that you don't have to see anymore carnage. You lower his – its head onto the table, and the rest of him following it, and avoid eye contact as you push the body forward. The lip of the disposal sucks it in quickly, and expels the corpse like a rejected file just as fast.
The windows, or the single window stretching wide across the wall, curved, is your enemy. You shouldn't look up next time. You make a mental note of this as your eyes remain glued to the frost crystals forming at record speed on your medic's head, shoulders, knees, and feet. They sparkle and shimmer like diamonds, covering fuchsia and bare grey skin as you pass by 43 Eqtoqa c, a planet with a surface so reflective it almost mirrors the brightness of your sun. The windows are shaded enough that you can look on without it hurting your eyes. It crunches and cracks beneath the weight of space, pressure unforgiving to even the hardiest of troll anatomies. His head explodes. You can't look away. You try not to think about what that corpse used to mean to you.
You manage to look away and resettle your stomach. How many more do you have left to go? Four, five? Seven, eight? You didn't bother checking. You don't want to check. You don't want to think about it.
Though, in the end, they're all corpses. Objects. The thing you just lifted and threw away wasn't him, it wasn't him, not really. That was an object, his vessel. That body wasn't the one that kissed you, it held the person who did. Same with that limb in the freezer. The legs you had to step over outside. The shattered horn fragments on the floor in the hallway belonged to a body, not a person. Just a body. You wish you were just a body too.
Closing your eyes, taking a deep breath, and looking at the ground, you recollect yourself enough to keep going. You take your glasses off to wipe them on the hem of your shirt while you turn around, and mentally note to do your laundry before anything else. You put your glasses on.
Your vision goes from blurry to crystal-clear, but you can't rid yourself of the fuzzy feeling in your head. Coping, that's what it is. A natural mental reaction to severe emotional trauma. You step over the same pair of legs and decide that you'll just get this one over with.
When you glance at its face, you see your eyes staring back at you. There's no scar on your – its cheek. Its scleras are white instead of yellow, and its jaw still looks like your captain's.
You remember in complete clarity how your lusus tried to shoot you while bearing your likeness.
You throw up.