Work Text:
Awake.
(v. to stop sleeping; to wake from sleep)
Awake is an action. To ‘awake’ - to move, to cough, to sing, to fall, to dance, to jump, to rest, to run, to scream. To ‘awake’ is to open a juncture of infinite circumstances. It is a room to move in. The joint between one moment and the next wherein every action: is illimitable dominion of every microcosm of a second. To be awake.
to breathe again
(a. not asleep)
Awake is. Conscious. A lack of stupor, apprehending, feeling, awareness. Alive. Vigilance in the observations of surroundings. Cognizant to be, to experience, to understand firsthand. Awake – is to imply that one has become alive to something.
where am i
Awake.
Awake.
Awake. (v.)
Awake (v.)
Awake (v.)
Awake (v.)
Awake (a.)
Gasping, reeling. To be in a whirl, to be disorderly violent, to waver or fall-
ingfallingfallingfallingfall-
Hebetude fading. Where is here? Who is what? What am I?
where am i
Panic. Panic.
‘Panic’ – derived from the French word panique, in turn derived from Greek panikos – meaning literally “of Pan.” Pan. A pipe-play, nymph-chasing god. The adjective first began appearing in the beginning of the 17th century, and the noun form of the word followed roughly a century later. ‘Pan’ – a Doric contraction of paon, meaning “pasturer”
art music love-chasing shepherd
‘Panic’ – Pan. His shout is said to have instilled fear in the giants who fought the gods. Pan is held responsible for causing Persians to flee in terror at the battle of Marathon.
“Panic”
fear dread fright alarm terror trepidation
Fear is the most general term and implies anxiety and usually a loss of courage. It is in sequitur for something. “Fear of the unknown.”
Dread usually adds an idea of reluctance – to face something, to meet a person, to recognise a situation. It suggests aversion alongside anxiety. “Faced the meeting with dread.”
Fright implies a shock. An instant. A moment of sudden, startling fear. “Fright at being awakened suddenly.”
Alarm suggests a deterioration of a situation – a sudden and intense awareness of immediate danger. Something is wrong. “View the situation with alarm.”
Terror implies the most extreme degree of fear. “Immobilized with terror.”
Trepidation adds to the aforementioned ‘dread’ the implications of timidity. It is trembling before public speaking; it is state police knocking on your door. It is hesitation. “Raised the subject with trepidation.”
Panic – unreasoning and overmastering fear causing hysterical activity.”
panic i am panicking
Awareness is screaming into me with the force of a collision. A crash. A meteor colliding with the ship, my knee crashing into a ladder rung, my immune system tearing itself apart.
The water around me is draining, but it’s slower than it should be – none of the fluid onboard the Penrose had been for…cycles. Not since the lead which comprised the joins and structures had been salvaged. Being clean hadn’t mattered. Drinking water hadn’t mattered. Cryogenic fluid hadn’t mattered. None of it had mattered since the clickclickclickclackclickclickclackclackclick from the Geiger counter mounted outside the reactor room started – and in a desperate last bid to prolong, to endure, to drag out, to outstretch suffering, they’d torn the lead from all the systems in the ship, even the-
They-
They (pn. Those ones: those people, animals, or things)
They: Plural. What do they want to do? They aren’t as popular as they once were. They dance well. They dance. They.
I am shivering and crying and clawing at the fucking lid of the cryogenic pod because it still isn’t open yet and my fingers are black and my skin is peeling and I can see muscle and that isn’t normal and my gums hurt and my bones hurt and I’m always hurting and nothing has been normal for so long but Elster where is Elster this pod wasn’t supposed to open for a long, long, long time on its own and it isn’t opening fast enough but there’s still no one, no body, no silhouette, no replika, no one standing by the operative control panel so where is Ellie where the fuck is Elster-
The air smells like shit. It smells awful. It is a mass grave site. It’s my grave. It was meant to be my grave.
I can’t walk.
Locomotive function was one of the last things to go. Sense of touch followed closely behind.
It doesn’t matter.
I crawl out of my coffin. Something cracks in my mouth; teeth grit as they are. It doesn’t matter. I am leaning over the edge. I can’t stand up to get out. I can shuffle my knees, a little. I do. I am leaning over the edge, taller this time. I tilt. I fall.
I hurt.
Pain is all I feel, and that is not exclusive to the solid floor of industrial metal that my frail, broken-down, dying body has impacted. There are only the emergency lights on. The reactor can’t have run cold. Even if it was pumping enough radiation into the air itself, contaminating every single thing in the ship, it was still on. There’s no way it’s been long enough. It would take tens of thousands of cycles for the strontium and cesium’s half-life to turn half, then half, and half again and again and again until it was so small that the Penrose’s primary electronics stopped being powered.
that can’t be possible please don’t tell me that’s possible
I can’t walk. I have never been very strong either – and radiation poisoning alongside my own jaundiced immune system do nothing but exacerbate and compound this issue.
It doesn’t matter.
I crawl.
My dress is dirty. It is covered in the dust and grime on the floor. It is covered in my own skin that has been sloughing off my body in waves for cycles before I went to sleep for the last time. (The water was red when it was draining.)
I crawl.
I make it to the bulkhead.
The access panel lies above me. I consider again that the emergency lights are on – but it doesn’t matter. I push myself against the wall. It hurts. I claw up the cold metal that I can’t feel, pushback against the pain that I can, and drag dead digits to the emergency release lever adjacent to the bulkhead’s access panel. I miss. I fall. It hurts. It doesn’t matter. I crawl up the wall again. I grasp the lever. The exposed muscle around my hands cannot summon the strength to grasp the handle. I fall. I hurt. It doesn’t matter. I scramble and gouge and tear and push again. I miss. I crawl up the wall again. I slip.
I think, vaguely, about crying.
I try again.
My hand slips again.
Pushing my back against the wall, I clamber into a seated position. I try to swing my arm above my head to reach the lever. I get maybe halfway there. It goes limp, it falls, it hits the wall, it hurts – I try again. I hit the lever. Once. Twice. Three times. I lose count. My hand doesn’t fall down again. I, less turn my head and more just let it flop to the side at an angle, but nonetheless I am now looking up. My palm is stuck inside the handle.
I rock sideways once. There is a sensation of tension in my wrist. I rock sideways again. Again. Again, and again and again and again and-
I fall over.
The tension in my wrist crescendos, then gives way, and my hand falls out of the lever – it flops before my eyes. I feel sick. I can’t remember when I didn’t last feel sick. It wasn’t bent like that before. That’s fine. That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. The door is open now.
I crawl.
Personal is to the left.
My head hurts.
I don’t think about it.
I crawl.
I can’t hear the Geiger counter anymore. The radiation is still there, seeping its poison into every little atom of this ship – this, I know in my bones maybe, but to confirm my suspicions, the counters are unlit, and display no readings. The ship is likely dead, Dead-er. It is a floating tomb. It has always been a floating tomb. We just couldn’t see it…at first.
It occurs to me that I didn’t hear the door open. I can’t hear my skin, scraping and bruising away over the floor as I crawl forwards, I can’t hear my own, scratchy, laboured breathing which I know is there because I can feel every sour, putrid breath scolding my throat, my oesophagus, my lungs. I can’t hear much of anything.
It doesn’t matter.
I get to the door. Personal. My room. The movie room. The dance room. And later, our room.
I crawl to the wall again.
I have been in pain for so very, very long and there hasn’t been anything we’ve been able to do about it for even longer. But that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find you. I’ll come home. I’ll do anything.
I can’t do it.
That doesn’t matter – I’ll do it. I need to. I fucking have to. I need you. I’ll get to you. I’ll find you. So, help me, please help me, I will find you.
But my arms won’t move again. The cage of my body has settled, despite the screaming desperation my soul ravages its iron bars with. Tear the wheels from a car, and no matter how loud, how ferociously, how awesomely the engine toils and shrills, it won’t move. I won’t move. I can’t move.
It doesn’t matter.
Time passes.
I stare at the emergency lever. It’s distance indisputable. An armlength, a mile. Time bleeds into itself. My body won’t move – I have to move I have to please-
But I can’t.
I can’t move – And all I can think of is you. Always you. It’s always been you. Elster…
I remember the first time we met. You scared the shit out of me.
It was the first cycle. I’d been instructed that I would be assisted by a Replika – an LSTR unit. I’d never met an LSTR unit before – didn’t even know what you’d look like. I’m embarrassed to admit my guesses were hopelessly wrong. Would it be rude to say I thought you’d be taller? I hope not – I have always so very hated being rude to you.
I was digging through the first of the many, many, many, operational manuals the nation had so graciously piled for me to cleave thumb through. As if the piles of paper were anything other than a fire hazard in deep space.
I thought you’d come online after the initial cycle, maybe after a few hours, something at least. But now I just remember staring consideringly at the ‘Replika – known issues’ envelope, surfing through the internal turmoil of morality and violations of privacy and if this made me in any way, any way at all like my bullies – and even the philosophy that wormed its way into there, somehow, or perhaps not surprisingly at all. Replika ethics have always been a slippery, tar covered, oil-slick-slope of problems and counter-problems. I’m getting distracted, I digress.
If you were presented with an instruction manual from God about someone else; a whole other living, breathing human being, capable of thoughts, dreams, feelings, struggles and change, above all: change…would you read it? Would it be right to read it? I don’t know. Were you a person then, too? Were you ever not?
Where does the line of Replika ethics get drawn, the finger in the sand, where is it?
where are you
I never got around to reading it – in the end I’m glad that I didn’t. We lived for us, by us. It wouldn’t have been right to have a manual to your very personhood, what I am now certain I would have violated by opening that treacherous envelope.
But I was pouring over my desk, and then that door shot open and the first thing you said to me was “Achtung!”
I’d say I’m discomfited to admit it, but you got to watch it happen. I fell over. I raised thin, shaking hands. I panicked.
You loomed silently for whole minutes at a time whilst I brought myself back under some semblance of control. The state-police were not here for me, I was not being evicted, I was not failing a class again, the bullies weren’t cornering me afterschool again.
It was just you.
I remember your ominous silence as you awaited my briefing – how you always have clung to routine – and perhaps, I consider now, you didn’t so much loom, as stand awkwardly at attention. Maybe that’s what you’ve always done. You did tell me that you think you would’ve chaffed under the rules and regulations in the standard humdrum of confirmative society. Oh, how I loved leaping into boundless unprofessionalism with you – my checklist of tasks for you, always a pooled joy. “Relating to: ‘that horrific banging noise’ – A.Y. “Elster please deliver us from this evil”” or “Relating to: ‘me’ – A.Y. “Ellie I’m the captain of a planetary exploration vessel, a pioneer of my time and I can’t touch my toes whilst standing, I am an abject failure to my bloodline – help me :( ” or even better “Relating to: Elster, Ellie, honey, sweety, my darling magpie – ignore the rest of this list – Come find me when you wake up. I want to make you a collar – fuck, you’d look so good in a collar”
You have always told me that I was not the type of commanding officer you were told to expect. Maybe you were as confused as I was.
Maybe I am reading all together too much into this.
Psychoanalysis is a terribly invasive thing, I think.
The door slides open.
I haven’t moved (though I feel as if I am again able).
My head hurts.
I don’t think about it.
Personal. My room. The movie room. The dance room. Your tomb.
There is colour on the railing of our bed. It is brown. Uneven, splotchy. Like flicking paint from a brush. Like blood out of lungs.
And I am struck viscerally by the image of you trying to tidy my room. Or maybe not my room. There is trash everywhere. My easel is here. The television is here, though it hasn’t worked in a long while. The gramophone is here. My bags are here, your bags are here. It all had to be moved. We ran out of space for garbage hundreds of cycles ago, and the lower gallery was piling up with the stuff. Maybe you were not cleaning my room.
But our bed is clean. Clean enough. Clean as it could be. I think that perhaps you were trying to crawl into it. Animals often seek somewhere quiet when they are dying. A nest to lay down in, a place to rest, a hole to seclude in, looking for somewhere to die. Birds are no different, and you have been my magpie for a very long time.
But the sliding doors are only almost closed, and your blood has hardened right between the two handles, right in the open space, right on the railing, right on our bed.
And I know what you were trying to do.
Ultimately, this is where we spent the last of our days. Our days. I would hold you. You would hold me. I couldn’t eat anything anymore – I just couldn’t. You had been running out of supplies for hundreds of cycles – but you would never tell me. Never how much, never how little. It should come of little surprise how we both dwindled. But here, was haven. Here was safe. Here was to have, and here was to hold.
So, you had closed the walls. Or tried to. To protect. To conserve. To cherish. To respect. To take this soft, quiet place and hold it. Hold it so, so very fucking tight. To have and to hold.
And we held on for so, so long.
My sweet, silly, gorgeous magpie.
But you couldn’t keep your promise.
I can see it, how you might’ve hunched over, coughed. Maybe once, maybe twice. Maybe it was a long, torturous hacking that ended in blood. Maybe it was quick. I doubt it was quick. The only things that have ever been kind to us were each other – always each other. I cannot recall the sounds of your rasping, wet coughs (and even to lose that, to lose you – your pain, your suffering – even that…it feels like betrayal, and I can only ask that you forgive me. Please forgive me. Please be here to forgive me.)
…I hope it was quick.
And I can see it, how you tilted, slipped, keeled and tumbled over. The door furthest from the bulkhead is more open than the other, and nothing has moved inside the Penrose-512 in earnest in a very long time. I can see you gripping the handle – holding on, always holding on. But it was too much. In the end, you weren’t enough. We weren’t enough. You fell. I imagine you tried to get back up.
Gazing upon you, I know that you didn’t.
And I feel, vaguely, like crying.
I think I ignored you at first – wilfully to begin with, even if I don’t think I was thinking about it all that much. Well, maybe thinking a lot, but not that deeply…
What was that thing that Erika said? ‘Talk little but say a lot.’ I think I did the opposite of that; I think. My brain is a messy, messy place to be.
But I ignored you, almost hid from you. I had come here to run very, very far away – and even here, even now – launched from what was effectively a massive magnetic rail-cannon towards the Ort cloud, I still wasn’t alone. So, I hid. I did my job – I didn’t do much else – I was too paralysed by fear (as always, always and always.)
I got lonely. I got lonely very quickly. I have always been lonely. The weird girl, the transfer student, mummy’s girl. Radio-head, head always in the clouds. Go-away-girl don’t-sketch-in-your-book-girl. Even later: freak, pale hair, ghost-girl, always-sits-alone-girl, going-grey-girl. Then further: who-was-that-girl, abomination-girl, inbred-girl, wrong-girl, kill-yourself-girl, run-away-girl.
And I’d always wanted to run. So, I ran very, very far away.
I remember missing my mum. A lot. I missed you so much mum. You raised me, in your own stumbling way up high on that, quiet, secluded little shack. I thought it suffocating, in my later years. Yet now, I can recall lying in bed, up late into each and every one of those early cycles, wishing I could trade anything just to be with you again. You sent me gifts, little nick-nacks, books that I still have no idea how you got past contraband inspections – it took me so very, very long to figure out a loop-hole in the ‘utensils’ section of their ‘personal belongings’ clause to be able to bring my paints – and yet you gave me movies, books, pictures, a gramophone, records (your favourite records; Schubert had always been a shared love of ours.) You poured life into the clinically industrialized tomb of the Penrose-512. But I never got to say goodbye before I left. Never-ever and thinking about that makes me want to cry. I always wanted to give you a hug for that. A kiss for that. A let-me-see-you-one-more-time for that. I want to hold and hug you so, so very bad. Just for a moment, just for one moment. Please.
But I ran from you too Elster. I have never been afraid of the unknown, but Replika have hurt me all my life and so I was afraid of you.
I think for those first few weeks I spoke less than I ever have in my entire life…
I wonder if you were lonely too.
But I ran away from you as well…I don’t think I ever apologized for that.
You are still.
Even in your earliest, beginning days, you were never still. Always alert, always watchful, always twitching around and looking for something to busy your hands with. A socket-wrench, an access-panel, and later, my hands, my face, my hair. Even in the stabilization chamber, you were breathing, shifting, moving. It looked like you were dreaming. My magpie.
But you do not look like you are dreaming now. It is quiet, and I would almost prefer that nauseating clickclackclickclick of the Gieger counter to this pulling, dark, suffocating quiet. I want for noise. I want for song. I want for movement. I want for healthy skin. I want to walk. I want to dance. I want so very badly to dance with you. I want you. Please. Please, please, please. I want so, so, so very fucking badly to have you. I’ll do anything. I’ll do fucking anything. Please, Elster.
But you are so very, very still.
…
It goes sort of like this.
I cry. I choke. I black out. I wake up with bleary, blurry eyes, I see you again, and it all repeats itself.
I am closer every time. I am touching your ankle – and I can’t feel it, but I know in the marrow of my fucking bones that it is cold and that’s not right you were never cold, never ever cold. And I long to hear the soft whirring of the internal composition that made the temple of you – but you are dead. You are so very dead, and nothing will ever be right again, not never. And I don’t think my ears are working, bedsides.
I claw at you. I drag you. I black out. I gasp.
‘Awake’
To be awake.
And I am dragging you. Through the stern hall. The bulkhead separating personal and the upper gallery is here. I reach for the emergency release lever. I grab it – it h u r t s – I slip, I am falling towards the floor-
I black out.
I awake, and the eternal recollection of you is left seeping across my mind.
The door is open.
I don’t look at the reactor door.
A body is a precious, disgusting thing. It produces filth and grime, it grows hair in places that you don’t like, it deposits fat and cellulite, it breaks out in acne. Muscle builds unevenly. Scars pucker and pinken like sores instead of paling to aesthetically pleasing stripes. Ingrown hairs and burns leak puss. It is unclean. It hungers. It cramps. It stinks. It shits. It sweats. It bleeds. Sometimes when you look into a mirror, you impulsively imagine gutting yourself.
But it belongs to you.
The Gieger counter had been locked out at its max of 8 roentgens since the 4000th cycle.
Mine belonged to me. I was supposed to get to say what happened to it.
I drag you into the room, past the ladder. It’s still surrounded by that yellow reflective tape from when I fell down the ladder somewhere around cycle 500 – then, it had turned every walk into a walk of shame. My mood would always sour as I passed it. Later, it was a joke – something that we’d poke and laugh at each other about – oh, how I yearn for your biting, but soft sarcasm. Somehow soft. You were always soft, so, so very soft for me. Now, the surface of the tape scratches my forearms, my chest, my legs as I crawl past it, as I haul you with me.
It is Sisyphean. But Sisyphus built a legend of himself by not giving up. By doing absolutely nothing and absolutely everything pushing that boulder up that hill. To defy. To live in spite of. To enjoy. He moved that boulder forever, again and again and again. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I would move forever for you.
I make it to the bulkhead for the forward hall.
My head hurts so fucking much – it’s like there’s needles in my brain, twitching. It’s like acupuncture, pinging across my subconsciousness and the fabric of me feels like it is beginning to unravel.
I don’t even remember blinking and all of a sudden, I am trying so very hard to vomit. To hurl. To upchuck. To spit bile. Whatever you want to call it, it hurts so fucking bad. The bullies’ boots are slamming into my stomach over and over and over and over and over-
(And I would get kicked over and over and over and over and forever for you).
Even then, I turn away from you. Though I know there is likely no fluid, certainly no food to be upheaved (I haven’t eaten in so long) – there is in me the desire to protect, to cherish, to love, to give, and to bleed for you. To have and to hold.
So, I turn away, so I don’t splatter my blood and stomach lining on your body.
The door is open. There are needles in my brain and it’s like someone has replaced my optic nerve for a scalpel.
It doesn’t matter. I’ll bleed for you. I’ll cry for you. I’ll curl up in so much fucking pain because it feels like my stomach is trying to tear my insides asunder on it way out of my throat, my mouth. I’ll do it for you. All for you. I’ll do anything for you.
Black.
Awake. ‘Awake’
My lungs hurt. I’m always hurting. It is somehow but absolutely torture. Seeing you dead shouldn’t slide right into the pain in my chest, in what teeth I have left. It should level me, destroy me. Cleave my soul into pieces and tear me apart. It does. But I have been dying of radiation poisoning for at the very, very least, over three-thousand cycles now, and pain is me. I am pain. I am in so much fucking pain.
But I could deal with the pain if you were here. I could live if you were here. I’d do anything to have you here.
please come back
I drag you.
I can’t walk. That’s fine. I’ll crawl. I’ll crawl as long as it takes. As long as it’s for you. Anything for you. I’ll do anything for you. Fucking anything.
I push trash bags and bags of trash out of the way. I am spitting blood.
A few of them split open – I’m not surprised, they were never meant to grow this old – and maybe the radiation is affecting them – I don’t know, that was always your area of expertise – all I know is that it kills. And it kills painfully, and slowly. My tongue pokes the holes in my grin where my teeth should be, and though I can’t feel it, I know my hair is patchy, paper thin. When I claw my hand out to shuffle, I can still see the muscle wherein should be my skin.
The open garbage bags spill trash on me. That’s fine. My body shields yours. First time for everything. Maybe physically, at least. I remember how you would curl into my embrace, hide yourself in the asylum of my collarbone. I would peel open my chest and claw out my heart just for the chance to shelter you within the sanctuary of my ribs. Anything for you Ellie, anything.
Liquid rot has slathered my right arm. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. I drag you with my left, I carry you, I shield you, I protect you.
To have and to hold.
And I am the most selfish woman in the world because all I want – if anything, if anything at all, for one last moment: I just want you to hold me. My mum was never good at showing me affection – she taught me how to paint, how to listen to sounds, to music, how to use the radio, how to break down formulas in my head, think in three dimensions. But I can almost count on both hands the amount of times she hugged me. My auntie was stilted with me at the best of times, my teachers hated me, with Isa it always felt like I was hugging her instead, and Erika’s affection was the awkward process of getting suspended – breaking the bullies’ nose so hard and so violently that they’d leave me alone for days. I so very rarely got hugs. But then there was you. Ellie, my Elster, Du bist die Liebe meines Lebens, my magpie.
The bulkhead to the flight deck is before me. Before us. I can’t hear the scream that pierces my throat, but I can feel the blood flash through the holes in my teeth, down my chin as I haul and shove myself forward to the release lever. My hand claws against it, finds purchase, and then I am falling, but it is falling with me. I hit the ground. I blink spots out of my eyes. I can’t remember the last time I was in this much pain. I don’t think I’ve ever hurt this much. Not never. I try to curl up but moving hurts. I try to stay still, but I’ve already twitched and so it’s worse but even still, Ariane Yeong is synonymous with pain. This is an irrefutable fact of the universe.
This does not stop me shaking and gasping and writhing and trying to stay as still as I can but despite that I shudder and sniffle and flex my hands, and try to curl my toes but those stopped working a long time ago because everything below my knees is dead and I feel dead and-
Black.
help me ellie please i need you to help me
i can’t do this on my own
Awake. ‘Awake’ – to be awake.
Pain. Torture. – to be Ariane Yeong.
Colour floods my vision. We were always so scared of cataracts – take my limbs, take my skin, take my feeling, take my hearing but please let me see you. Even if you are choking on your own oxidant, even if you have to use my walking cane because you ran out of spare parts countless days ago and your legs just don’t move like they should and it’s not like I’ll use it I can’t fucking walk, I can barely crawl – but it doesn’t matter – just please let me see you.
please
The door is open. I can see them. They’re so fucking pretty and if we’re going to die anywhere, maybe it can be here.
I’d love to take you down to the observation deck, lounge in the chairs, rest and gaze far, far away, out into the black-blue light with twinkling hope, always glimmering, always just out of reach. But the trash was building up, and it need to go somewhere non-vital and as far away from personal as possible. The observation deck fit both of these criteria. We had our first kiss there. You were so gentle – you’ve always been so very gentle with me Elster. Just hold on a little longer, we’re almost there – I just miss the observation deck I suppose. It doesn’t matter now.
My vision is so cloudy, my head is swimming, the scalpel stills rests behind my eye, the needles still pierce my brain, it feels like my synovial fluid has been swapped for steel wool – and the cockpit looks so dirty, which doesn’t make sense, how dirty could it possibly be in space? There looks there’s a giant smudge in the centre of the reinforced alumino-silicate glass.
It doesn’t matter.
You’re not here, but that’s alright. It’s okay. You’ve worked so hard for so long Elster, you can rest. You deserve rest, you deserve so much, so fucking much, and that fucking nation and that stupid, stupid civil war was never going to give it to you.
The horrific thing about cruelty is not what you think it is. It is not that people are capable of destroying everything that matters to someone else. It is not violating someone’s body with metal and fire, wood and gas and being fine with your actions because you hate this person. The horrific thing about cruelty is the ignorance inherent to it.
Because if they had known me. If they knew everything about me – lived my life, seen everything through my eyes, appreciated everything that I have seen, and said and done, they never would have hurt me. I would never have hurt them, either. We would have understood and respected one another. Even if we still hated one another, we would have respected each other’s right to their self.
I get you into the pilot seat. I am the commanding officer – it is by rank and rights, my seat, but it is where you sat when we held hands for the first time – when I realized that trust is a lot more difficult for you than words can ever express. When I found you stargazing over and over and over – and always I wondered if you were lonely too.
I remember “You are not the type of officer I was told to expect.” I remember the way your accent curled around certain words, how you sounded so much like the Itou family. I remember the tentative fingers around my hand, not quite interlacing – you weren’t sure how then, how to reach for another, how to ask. You only knew that you wanted comfort. That was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay, baby. They hurt us so bad, and we weren’t ready to start picking up the pieces. Not then. Not yet.
They label us what suits their needs, they send the both of us off into deep space – a yet-to-be-realised suicide mission, all for a fucking publicity stunt. 512. LSTR-512. Penrose-512. Five-hundred and twelve Gestalts. Five hundred and twelve LSTR units. One thousand and twenty-four people, sentenced to death in a frigid, metal tomb. Maybe it is little wonder they let all my contraband through inspection – saves them the fuel needed to burn it – it’s not like they planned on us coming back. A political stunt – a tactic to say to the citizens of the nation and those in the empire, ‘Look here, come wide, come all – we are charting the boundless stars! Praise be to our brave explorers, praise be to the Revolutionary!”
They knew we wouldn’t find anything past the Ort cloud. Not nothing.
And yet they lie to themselves, as if ruining a life in this thing we call war is somehow a different action to doing it at home, in your living room, or on the street.
I was told all sorts of things about the voyage of the Penrose – my Penrose, the 512. They told me that this is for war. For the war. They told me all sorts of things about war, too. They said war is Hell. They said war isn’t Hell, because hell is for the sinful and war kills the innocent. They say war is the opposite of love. They say war is the Glory of the Revolution, and they call it things like Great and Patriotic. They give medals of honour, they give ribbons of gallantry, they say it is your duty.
But war is only ever stupid.
I clamber into the co-pilot seat. I am so, so tired. And I have been hurting for so very, very long.
I reach across the crevice between us, and it is an armlength. You are so very still. But it’s okay. I love you. I’m sorry. You couldn’t keep your promise, but that’s okay. I’m here Elster. I’m here. I love you. I love you I love you I love you.
I’d claw the vasculature out from under my skin to sustain you. I’d feed you my own poisoned blood. I’d put your hands around my neck. I’d flay the skin from my body and tear you apart so there’s nothing that can separate our hearts anymore. I’ll move mountains for you. I’ll build a home for you. I’ll rip the foundations of the universe to the ground for you. I’ll build a planet for you. I’ll make a home for us, together. And we’ll be happy, and life will be better and we’ll grow old and please just come back to me.
I’d do anything for you.
I cradle your hand. I want so badly to kiss your knuckles, but I fear I don’t have the strength. I fear that I may drop you. But I will never let go of you again. Never ever again. I left you for so long, and that was so selfish of me, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I never got to tell you how well you did (and you did so well). You worked so hard for so long. You did so, so very well. My darling, my Ellie, my sweet magpie.
I let our hands bump against the centre console, resting there. We deserve to rest so desperately, and I so fervently want to deliver it to you, for you. I can see several of the lights beeping behind my eyelids. I know from literal thousands of cycles of operation of the Penrose-512 what it means, even without the siren – my ears are shot, after all. An incoming physical object – destined for collision. By the frequency of the orange blinking light in my right eye, won’t be for a few minutes. That’s fine, it’s probably a meteor, another stray bit of debris, an offshoot of the ancient boundless processes that carved out the stars, now hurtling through the endless expanse of space at just the right time and just the right place to hit us. Lucky me, lucky us.
It doesn’t matter – I won’t be here much longer anyway.
Things have rarely been kind to us that weren’t each other – always each and only each other.
I want to feel your hand. I want to hold you tight. But I can’t. That’s okay. I can feel a pressure welling behind my eyes, but that’s okay. It’s okay. We can be failures together. As long as we’re together.
…
Finally, I open my eyes again, because I am dying, and I know that I am dying – and it is a miracle I made it this far – radiation poisoning should’ve killed me years ago, I shouldn’t have been able to crawl this far, and if I think about the doors and how many times I got so, so very tired and the black-outs after black-outs after black-outs and- in the end I just don’t want to think about it.
My head hurts.
You’re not here to kiss it better.
i want you here so so so very badly
To be awake.
This ship shouldn’t have survived half as far as we’ve flown, but everything turned around in the end for me, because I was the luckiest girl in the world, to find you. To avoid you, to speak and titter awkwardly with you. To slowly, quietly tiptoe our way into conversations which are just starting to get less and less work-related and closer to who we are. Eating together for the first time was the most terribly hilarious thing I’d experienced in years. Yours rations were cinderblocks. Clay-roof tilings. And I couldn’t eat with a straight face because you looked and sounded like you were eating cement and looked every bit just as happy about it. I shared some of my food with you in a few cycles when we did it again. We slowly pieced together what you liked, and I wanted nothing more than to show you a properly cooked bowl of buttery, creamy mashed potatoes. We stargazed together not long after that. Slowly, I followed you around the ship. I hassled you, distracted you, actively lowered productivity. I even stole your hat for a few cycles. You never seemed to mind. Maybe I was right, and you were as lonely as I was. You began to seek me out as well. We stargazed often, in the observatory, in here – talking nothings. You were my everything. You asked what I did when I wasn’t piloting the ship or pouring over long-range scan data for hours and hours. I figured I could trust you enough then, and so I showed you: my paintings. We still didn’t talk much, and I have a feeling that you always wanted to say more. I still wanted so much more – I was so lonely, and had been for so long, and you were only just finding the steps to lead you to who you were, and I wanted you to touch me and to hold me and you to let me in so I could hold you too. To have and to hold – We didn't talk much then...but what else could the lonely, desolate islands I painted have been but nothing other than windows into my soul?
I didn’t know I could fall in love with someone the way I have with you.
I’m the luckiest girl in the world, to die with you.
“Liebe bis in den Tod.”
“Ich werde dich lieben, bis alles stirbt. Und dann noch mehr. Und dann noch einmal.”
I open my eyes. There are stars. I am still spitting blood, but I am smiling. The exposed muscle in my hand twitches as my thumb caresses your palm. You’re not here, you haven’t been here in so long…but that’s okay. I forgive you. You gave me everything you had. And now, I you.
And that green and blue smudge is getting larger and larger by the moment, yet I can’t find it in me to care. The twinkling motion of hundreds of different stars, thousands of light years away, it’s gorgeous. You're gorgeous.
And you sit in my seat, and though you look much more like you are asleep, you remain far, far too still. My Elster. My Ellie. My beautiful, wonderful, sweet, silly magpie…I love you.
I think, vaguely, of crying.
But it’s okay. I love you. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.
i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you come back
“Bis die Ewigkeit endet.”