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Anya tells him about the dead pixel.
The Captain couldn't find it, but she doesn't—can't hold it against him. He needs to focus on the bigger picture: if he paid attention to every star laid before his cockpit windshield, they would have crashed against an asteroid years ago.
The morning after she feels childish, really, to have bothered him with such a small thing. She knows he's busy—and yet he listened to her, told her that he'd look for it to the point of madness.
A part of her can't help but doubt that, idly musing if it's worth the effort to see if he has forgotten.
Most of it doesn't want to remember the other thing she asked him about.
Places Anya has slept in in the last few days:
1. The Med Bay
(She always has a heachache in the morning, and her shoulders are stiff and sore. Her office smells of)
2. The Med Bay
(iodine and disinfectant. If she breathes in too deep, it burns her nose but)
3. The Med Bay
(It calms her.)
Anya doesn't sleep—instead, she wanders the worn and known corridors of the Tulpar, monotonous clanging, dull metal-on-metal. She imagines the noises to be the emotions of the machine, sees how far she can run with it: the shaking of the stairs when she hurries down them means slow down, the humming the empty coffee machine makes a sorry. She stops once her brain gives meaning to the screech of an electric screwdriver inside Utility.
(There was a night, too, where she spent her five allotted hours sitting outside the Utility door, like a scolded child, waiting for Swansea—anyone, to wake up and unlock it, an understanding without words. At least she can say she's found better things to waste them with).
Sometime later, when Daisuke is complaining about their newfound lack of mattresses, she can only give a weak smile and look down at her hands in response, picking at her nails. She has grown accustomed to sleeping on the floor.
Concerning the gun, she has three options:
a) Find a way to break the safety case and kill herself
(The sharp exhale of breath, pointed against the flat, dull hurt. She has been thinking of where would she aim it, where would she do it, but she can only go so far until she imagines her lifeless body, the splattered blood. She'd hate to leave them with that mess).
b) Find a way to break the safety case and kill him
(It's not very practical, and she has never held a gun before. But she has seen others do it, so easily that it's almost second nature, and at night she imagines the feeling, heavy and malicious and buzzing through her, a half-formed fist where the grip is supposed to be.)
c) Beg him to hand it over and swear it's for emotional support only
(If that hasn't worked the dozen of times she has tried, she doubts it will work now. If the Captain is more worried for her mental state, or for his safety, she doesn't want to know, and convinces herself that it's not uncertainty what she feels, but bone-weary understanding; you never know how he'd take it. In the end she decides that it doesn't matter, that those posibilities are truly one and the same, and anyhow she was thinking of the things he was worried about, so he wasn't entirely wrong.)
When all three of them turned unfeasible, she decides on a fourth: hiding the case, pawing at the metal ground like a horse, hoping she can somehow bury it. When it's done, she doesn't allow herself to think about what she did—she forgets where by the time Curly finds her in the cockpit.
The night before they crashed, she had a dream.
It was tempting to interpret it as a premonition, that she had been at least prepared for that—but she had been just as confused and shocked and scared as the others when it happened, and she had been having the same suffocating nightmare for weeks regardless.
One of the psychology books that she had read said that those who are emotionally fragile often look for omens, a sense of stability; and she used to be such a logical person… She has to remember that—she can't afford to forget any more things about herself.
But she recalls the dream (singular, just one) she has every night perfectly, the events as it follows:
- She's somehow back in her room, her bed unmade, single sheet tangled, and after she had gone through all the trouble to make it just right… Still, she's too tired to care, so she crawls into it, its welcoming grime.
- But just as she is about to fall asleep, she notices she's lying on something hard. When she manages to find it, she realizes it's a horse figure—Polle! She twists it and finds another toy pony nestled inside, and she does this again and again, until the only Polle left has nothing but a small, fleshy thing inside, pale and raw, like chicken at home. She brings her pinky closer and the thing grabs it, gobbles it, hungry for—something.
- So she throws it hard, hitting the door. It makes a strange, clicking sound. She could have locked it the whole time.
Her last dream aboard the Tulpar is eventually different, a wave of nausea and somnolence, and she knows this is it because it's a cold, dreamless rest.