Work Text:
Date: December 30, 1968
Desmond. December 30, 1968. I've made a silent promise to myself to not continue to write these, in an effort to preserve his ownership of this system. He was the one who asked me to make it, after all - Who am I to take it from him? Who am I to take the one thing that still belonged to him on this ship away? I was just going to write one last log, as a warning to any future crew that should find themselves in this hell. It was necessary.
And yet here I find myself, in my hazy stupor, at this terminal again. It feels as though all else has left me; my wits, my sanity, my memories. All has left but what I remember of these writings - ameteur at best, yet radiant of a human life that was so close to mine. I read and read and read these logs again and again, and I feel the need to keep myself sane with similar writings.
I don't know if he wanted me to read any of them at all - some of them even explicitly asked me to not read it. I couldn't be bothered to when he was writing them, really, I just assumed it was writings of our work shifts and whatever else went on in his mind. But after he died, I couldn't do it. It was too much to not see. I needed closure. I needed to be able to see his words, and hear some final semblance of his voice in my head. I don't know if I feel any better now that I know what he wrote about, now that I know the reasons he sat at the river alone. The guilt chokes me to death every night, but I wake up again. I'm still alive.
The people he describes in these logs - Jess and Lukas, I believe - have long since passed. Replaced by blank faces I care not the name of. Why am I still alive? Why was I the one to live? I can't even remember how he died. I still can't believe I've forgotten something so important. But does it really matter? In the maws of a hellish beast, dissolved into enzymes and proteins in a disturbing mass of goo, charred and burned, at the bottom of a 30-foot cliff, reduced to shrapnel and target practice, or god forbid in the stomach of that thing. What does it matter how it happened? He's gone either way. And I remain as witness.