Chapter Text
The first human colony was thriving and expanding, serving as the symbol of growth and inspiration for humanity's first true steps into the greater universe. As the Captain assigned to the Invincible II, you couldn't be more proud and honoured to have seemingly succeeded so phenomenally in your role of delivering the first colonists here safely.
From an outside perspective the voyage had been a roaring success overall, thanks in no small part to your contribution. You were praised on every news broadcast, your name and photo and story detailing this wonderous chapter of your service to humanity plastered everywhere for months. Though it was difficult to get any spare time with you for an interview, as you worked to help develop the colony as it laid its foundations; and later used "the continued effort needed to help your community thrive" as a means of dodging as many media outlets as you could.
In truth you were worried about what you might let slip at an unguarded moment. How would the whole of humanity react to you mentioning the dizzying loop of timelines and universes, how you spent countless hours falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of paradoxes?
How would you play off a side comment on how the memories that were TECHNICALLY yours made you fearful of falling asleep?
How would you brush aside mentioning you forcing yourself to, on nights just like this one, drink coffee after coffee to stay awake as long as you could, just so you wouldn't close your eyes and reopen them in the cryopod?
Being driven to madness was a common theme in your timeloop skips aboard the Invincible II. Whether it was mentioned in a passing comment, or an aftermath you had to witness, or something you felt yourself close to experiencing time after time after time. Even thinking on the concept made your head hurt, and so you decide to try not to think about it at all. Instead you devote yourself to your crew and the colonists, taking your leadership role and responsibilities planetside, helping as much as you could so you don't have time to think about needing help yourself.
If nobody else had been through what you'd been through, maybe it would be easier. Maybe you could pretend it never happened at all, written it off as a dream and burned it from your memories over time. But that was impossible, considering your Head Engineer had been right beside you through almost all of it; and the times he wasn't at your side directly, he was never more than a loop away, though the when and where was never something you could completely control.
You wonder if he remembers all of his lives too. If he remembers scribbling on random pieces of paper and plastering them all over the ship. If he remembers wishing you dead, seeing you dead, sometimes trying to kill you himself. If he remembers all the pain and hatred he held for you, if he remembers the years of agonizing waiting for the next time you'd show up.
If he remembers the end, finally an end, sitting at the diner as he gave some final parting words encouragement before he too blinked from existence.
You never had the strength to ask him.
You consider it your biggest failing as his Captain. All the crew was your responsibility, their physical and mental health your job to take care of. Yet the one person who had been through as much as, if not more than, yourself . . . He was somehow the one person you couldn't talk to. The one person you WOULDN'T talk to.
Maybe because acknowledging his pain would mean acknowledging your own, or maybe because the guilt he carried was one you felt with every fibre of your being, and you blamed yourself more than you ever blamed him. But after those words of thanks for not giving up on him, you never brought it up again. And as if following your example, neither did he.
It's been a year now, and still you can't be alone in a room with him due to your overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. That itself only piles on more shame, more guilt, more anxiety chewing away at your nerves until you're an overcaffinated, overworked, and overtired mess of a human being. It's getting so much harder to stave off the effects of your mental burnout, and you can feel the dam of emotion and crippling self-doubt threatening to burst in your brain if you so much as try to relax.
What kind of Captain were you? What kind of leader were you? What kind of useless, selfish, neglectful-
"Captain? Requesting permission for entry."