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The best, worst thing that has happened to him in recent memory. Even encountering it was a complete trick of fate. As per usual with his life.
It feels wrong, to see her again like this. Stealing a scrap of reunion, rather than earning the right, in death. Every flaw in his person is what brings him to press play, and then again, and then again, until he can recreate the whole clip on the backs of his eyelids.
But...
When you've already stolen something to sate your hungers, there's really no sense in letting it go to waste.
"Rain is a gift from the Mother Goddess."
The recording quality is complete garbage. This so-called camera has a lens completely scuffed by the grit regularly whipped up by the winds, and then that day was fogged by the precious rarity, rain. The shape of her face is there, framed in by dust-blonde hair cast to eerie pallor under the firming darkness of the clouds. The shape of her face... the familiar fall of a homespun dress over a starved-thin frame... and.
"She is calling to us, urging us to take up arms and fight for our future."
Her voice. As crisp and steadfast as in his brightest, most searing memories. Now, for all this time already, wrested in fragments from the swift approach of death. Kept from the silence of Gaiathra's embrace, where the rest of her has long resolved into the dry sea of Mama Fenge's shifting sediments; a thousand thousand places upon the divine body's face… even slowly seeping into the deepest pores… all once and now always 'her.' He thinks of atoms, molecules, and slowly petting the glass under his fingers, scrolling down and down to drink in more of what the galaxy's great guard-conquerors claimed both men and stars to be made of.
That all stars are forges, casting forth vital elements of life. That the breath of their bellows flows out as the stellar winds. That this is why the long history of Sigonia-IV has such meagerness to show for itself: millennia after millennia, the lashes of these life-granting solar bodies have ceaselessly fallen upon the planet, scattering upon her, wearing her in to myriad shapes, leaving the scraps of creation behind in endless, smothering kisses of empty apology.
The wisdom of the men in black tells him: it is natural for the universe to grind you to dust, to aim at you all its fury.
It sure is a lot of fury to bear. If it's true, that the very materials he was born from have already spent eons being beaten down, he wonders if his own weariness is more, or less excusable. There is so much strength in her voice. The materials she was once made from spent just as many eons suffering, too.
"This rain accompanies us."
And with itself it bore them all away.
Every time he hears the patter, now, feels like the sharp points of iron nails tapping all down his back. Even through the crackle of a low-fidelity recording, compressed to hell, something manufactured solely on ceremony for the sake of corporate (heridentityherlifeherunnaturalgravesiteinthe starsit'salljuststandardbookkeeping), the raindrops in the background retain that certain quality that always torments him. It's the roar. Like a phantom crowd, and all their expectations...
This rain always accompanies him, and it always bears someone away.
"This rain protects us."
He lays down in the dreampool, the vapors already weighing down his eyelids. He pulls out his phone one last time. Presses play, right before it slips out of leaden fingers. The phone is left laying on his chest as he sinks deeper into the pool, as he mouths along to the words in oath, unwilling to drown out the very last of her voice:
"It is in this rain
that we shall meet our honorable demise."