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6/27/19XX - 16 YEARS
The sound of laughter echoes through the walls of what used to be some old schoolhouse. A small group of high-schoolers sit on the old, long-abandoned desks, having tossed aside their worries of getting dust all over their jeans after a small, light-hearted quarrel. A box of cigarettes is passed around, and most of them take one.
Swansea (not yet Swansea - he has a different name at this time, along with a different identity) is the last person the box is passed to. In this memory, he is a short girl, slightly overweight with baggy clothes to match- band t-shirt, ripped jeans, and worn-out battle jacket. The girl many decades away now doesn’t consider the cigarettes for more than a second, instead closes the box up and tosses it back to the person who’d brought it.
They ask her why not, not because they judge, but because it seems like an odd thing for her not to want to do. Out of character.
She shrugs and says it just isn’t for her. Doesn’t get her anywhere, no high or drunkenness. Not her cup of tea.
Besides, her dad would whoop her ass if she came home smelling like cigarettes. Nobody who wants to get places in life smokes, young woman. You won’t make me nor your mother proud by huffing tobacco all day.
They nod and laugh in an understanding way, and proceed to complain. It’s smothering! They might mean well, but they don’t understand how to go about it right, so they fuck it all up, and then wonder why we don’t want to talk. Impossible to talk to, you know? Just keep it in. ‘Til we can all hang out here, spill our guts, or some shit like that.
She laughs. Something like that, yeah.
They talk on for a few more hours, but it’s nothing serious. Bands, shows, radio stations. Grades and gossip.
After maybe four hours, they’re chased off by some old man shouting at them to get off of private property, and they find it absolutely ridiculous that anyone could bother with something like that because it’s an abandoned fucking school and nobody else is using it.
But they go anyway, because there were worse things that could happen in this world.
9/03/19XX - 19 YEARS
He bumps into her for the first time when they’re in college.
He’s barely starting to grow into his own skin and figure himself out. He’s not pretending to be someone he isn’t anymore, at least, is the big part.
He figures he’ll name himself Swansea. His mother’s hometown, and where his parents first met themselves. It’s a unique name, and he’s sure it’ll be butchered by some professor or another, but it’s his.
He’s grumbling to himself, pissed off because he was just 5 cents off from the cost of the meal he was trying to order. He told the cashier to cancel it (or more accurately, told him to just forget about it, because he wasn’t going to bother with this battle today) and took a seat at one of the tables since the diner wasn’t that busy. He’s hungry and stewing in his own frustration when she (hesitantly) sits down across from him.
She had been in line right behind him, and seen every moment of what had just happened. Of course, Swansea hadn’t exactly tried to keep a low profile. She’d seen the way his face shifted from boredom and apathy to stupefied shock and then insurmountable anger. She’d been right there to watch him cuss himself out and then snap at the cashier to forget his order and move on to somebody else who had that extra five goddamn cents!
He glares up at her, and she smiles timidly and holds a fist out, palm-up. When she opens her fingers, there’s a shiny quarter in the middle of her hand, and Swansea stops right in his track of anger to be dumbfounded. He looks her in the face again, now actually taking her in. Her face is splattered with freckles, and framed by ringlets of dark brown hair.
Swansea isn’t one to believe in beauty, as it stands- the true ugly of a person is how they act, not look- but he would be lying if he didn’t feel a distant sense of awe.
He keeps his brow furrowed but reaches out to take the quarter, and she draws her hand back. It is a wordless exchange, but the message is delivered quite seamlessly and Swansea stands back up to talk to the cashier again. He orders his food once more, and makes a bit of a show out of putting the quarter down with the rest of his money.
He’s given his change of two dimes and is told that his order will be out soon. He goes to sit at the table with the girl, not saying anything in the few moments they’re both sitting there and only sliding over the change, and is almost surprised when she stands after picking it up. He doesn’t watch her go, but props his head up with a fist to his cheek and elbow on the table, looking away from the register.
Swansea is about to lament about the oddity of the situation when she’s there again, sitting back in her spot. His brow furrows deeper now and he looks up at her.
“You need somethin’?” He’s gruff and standoffish, but she seems not to mind.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry. I just wanted to help. Hope you don’t mind if I sit here.” She isn’t shy when she speaks, and her voice comes a bit deeper than expected, but he doesn’t flinch- he’s already made a lot of assumptions in a few moments, and would rather not admit that he’d stereotyped her as being some poor timid soul. He does, also, note the subtle Irish lilt in her voice, sounding as captivating as she looks.
“...’s fine. I guess.”
They sit in silence for a few moments before the girl speaks up again. “I’m Maeve. I think I’ve seen you around campus a few times before, right?” Swansea feels almost embarrassed by the idea that she’d noticed him before this. Hopefully he hadn’t made any bad impressions.
“Yeah, probably. Place still twists me up.” He shakes his head. “Swansea.” She chuckles a little, and he’s quick to get defensive. “What?” He yips, sounding slightly offended.
“Nothing, nothing, sorry. It’s a nice name. Welsh, right?”
His face flushes a little but he nods, and is about to speak again when a waiter brings over both of their orders at the same time.
4/15/19XX - 26 YEARS
Swansea has very few solid memories from his drunken years. What memories he does have are obscured and distant, hard to reach. He can’t pinpoint at exactly what point he dove off the deep end. Some sorry set of months when he was 24, he knows for certain, but there’s no specific catalyst. It was a gradual shift to dependency. He’d always drink from time to time, but it had gotten remarkably worse. It was nightly now, save for the occasional sober nights sprinkled in here and there, but even with those, it was pretty severe.
He didn’t drink himself blackout-drunk every night, of course, but it was rare that he’d go long without a sip of something .
Swansea wants to feel bad for this, but he doesn’t. He can’t bring himself to, because he’s thriving . The hangovers, the spotty memory, the strained relationships, no, nothing compared to setting himself free with a bottle of booze and a couple of drinking buddies. He could deal with the consequences. Nothing good ever comes for free.
Tonight, he and one of his closest friends drive out to an open field. The grasses are thigh-high and the mattress they drag out is likely never going to see the inside of a home again.
Once they deem they’ve dragged it far enough, they drop it. Swansea leaps onto it immediately, laying down and looking up at the night sky. His friend excuses himself, says he’ll be right back to get the drinks, and is walking back the way they came.
Swansea hollers back an acknowledgement, then is alone.
He ponders his life for a moment. He almost wonders how he ended up here. Bottom of society- nobody liked a mean old alcoholic. Granted, he wasn't quite that old yet, but he was getting there. He's quickly burning through his mid-twenties, and before he knew it, he'd be thirty.
He should be getting his life in order, figuring out how to settle down, finding a home to raise his future kids in.
But this ? This life he’s built? Hell, it’s not perfect, and it sure as hell ain’t healthy, but he figures- with all the excitement, with all the joy and laughter, with all the moments shared with friends and with all the days slipping into delirious bliss- that this is what living really is.
When his friend returns it’s with two bottles of good, old, cheap whiskey, and they open them both, clink the lips together clumsily, and then take a swig.
12/11/19XX - 37 YEARS
Swansea is drinking alone now. The bar he sits at is emptier than usual, the clock ticking away seconds as some overplayed rock song from a good handful of years ago drones on on low volume. He sighs and looks up at the bartender.
He’s known the man- Richie, he calls him- for years. He’s been bartending at this bar for as long as Swansea can remember, and they’d helped each other out for a good stint by sharing an apartment a few years ago. To say they were close would be an understatement.
He returns the gaze and tilts his head a little, an almost inquisitive posture.
“Think you should be heading home about now, Swans?” He leans forward on the bar, so he can talk more face-to-face with one of his bar’s most consistent patrons. “Your wife’s probably worried sick with how late you’re out.”
Swansea only hums idly at that. “What time’s it?”
The bartender seems disheartened by the question. “Swansea, it’s two A.M., man. You probably should have left well over two hours ago, when your other buddy did. You know your wife’s probably worried sick about you.”
He huffs. It’s cold outside. He didn’t bring a thick enough jacket to keep the chill off completely. He doesn’t want to go back out.
“Maeve’ll be fine. She knows me. She knows I can handle myself.” He dismisses Rich’s earlier point, ever avoidant, still following his own currents. Still not listening.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t wanna seem bleak but... y’know. You’re in a rough spot. Your drinking could do you in any day now.” Swansea cocks a brow at the man. “I mean, I doubt you’d ever drink enough to poison yourself, but accidents happen to everyone, and booze doesn’t exactly help. Things happen.”
Swansea isn’t interested in lectures. If this man’s goal was to get him to leave, he was doing a good job at achieving it. He sighs and slips from his seat, pulling out his wallet to pay for the drinks he’d ordered over the night. He’s briefly concerned about missing his car keys before he remembers the deal they’d made forever ago: hand in his keys when he starts ordering drinks, get one or two cheap beverages on the house, then taxi home and have his keys in his mailbox when he wakes up. That bartender worries for him.
He sets the money on the bar and doesn’t wait for change, already turning to leave. “G’night,” he calls out.
“Night. Stay safe.”
Swansea walks out of the dimly-lit bar and into the streets. He squints his eyes at the light reflecting off of the snow piled up on the edge of the sidewalk, and reflexively turns his head upward to peek at the source.
He winces and screws his eyes shut at the blinding street light. Rich’s words flash through his mind.
‘Could do you in any day.’
It comes to him, vivid and feeling almost real.
His dead body, discarded in the last place anyone would care to even look. Irreverent and disgustingly unceremonious. Not even a thought of consideration. Nobody noticing until it’s too late. Hit by a car or murdered by someone who knew that a stumbling slurring man would be an easy mark or having some kind of heart attack or even a stroke.
The thought drives his breath out of him hard, as if he’s just had the wind knocked out of him. It’s almost a sob.
He can’t keep on like this, no. Not with his wife. Not with his daughters.
He doesn’t want some stupid mistake to lead to his children growing up without a father. He can’t do that to them. Not like this.
In his mind, to himself, he makes a decision to change. To try to quit, no matter how many attempts it takes, nor how long it takes. He knows it’ll be hard, and he’s already dreading just the thought, but he does not, even for a second, consider going back on his choice.
3/07/19XX - 40 YEARS
He’s relapsed again. He sits at home, on the couch. It’s past midnight, but what time it is exactly escapes him. The bottle of whiskey is lukewarm in his hand, dissatisfyingly room temperature, though Swansea can’t find it in himself to care.
He doesn’t exactly try to hide when he relapses. Honesty is important with these things, and he doesn’t think he would be able to lie to his wife’s face about it, anyway.
It’s happened too many times by now for Swansea to be upset about it, and he knows exactly what comes after. He’ll let himself drink tomorrow, too, then on Thursday he’ll admit it to his AA chapter at the weekly meeting he attends.
He’s been trying and failing over and over for a few years. Sometimes he wonders if it’s any kind of improvement, going back to the bottle time and time again even if he was trying so damn hard not to. Longest he’d gone is two months. This time it had only been a week.
He feels hollow, scraped empty. He hopes that the alcohol will fill that pit in his stomach and make him feel fulfilled in any way possible but these days it only makes him content with his apathy. There’s worry and anxiety, vague and lingering in the back of his mind as it tends to do, but he doesn’t bother to contemplate it- it’s more intangible than a real, solid feeling. There but only in the same way that air is, only felt when the wind blows.
The silence feels suffocating- stagnant and stifling- his thoughts feel feverish in these moments when he’s alone with himself and he almost wishes he had one of his old drinking buddies here to share company with. He didn’t talk to them too often anymore. He knows it’ll only make recovery harder.
He sets down the bottle and stands, stretching before he walks toward the hall to he and his wife’s bedroom, resigned.
5/12/19XX - 41 YEARS
Swansea is hanging out with a friend of his when he realizes that it’s been six months.
He hadn’t drank in six months.
He brings this up to his friend, in a way that almost suggests excitement. Pride. Things that are rare from him, the man that Swansea was.
He’s congratulated, in a genuine yet slightly dismissive tone, and drags on about it for a moment to the point he can tell his friend is slightly annoyed with his enthusiasm about it. Swansea apologizes with a laugh, but doesn’t feel bad about being bothersome with it in the slightest.
When they go out for food later that day, he tells the waitress about his sobriety. He knows she doesn’t care, and his friend snickers as he does so, but he feels like he needs people to know for him to be proud of it.
Of course, when he goes home, He tells his wife the same thing, and she smiles and hugs him and congratulates him, suggesting they eat at his favorite restaurant tomorrow as a treat. He accepts the idea without hesitation, and can feel the pride swell in his chest again.
It makes him hesitate for a moment.
Are treats and congratulations the only thing that indicate he’s actually achieved anything? If he went back to drinking tomorrow, in the dark hours of the night, would anything change?
It’s a train of thought that he quickly puts his foot down to derail. Unimportant. The only thing that matters now is the fact he’d pretty much made it- as far as he was concerned, anyway. Hardest part was behind him now.
7/16/19XX - 49 YEARS
Pony Express has assigned him to a new freighter. He isn’t surprised, of course, because he’d only been on the same one for more than a single trip once . There was always some issue that he had with the crews he was placed on, or issues they’d had with him. And, well, when you’re flying through space at unimaginable speeds in a machine that anyone could knock off course on a whim, team synergy becomes incredibly important. In his thirteen years of being on these freighters, he’d been on seven different ships- it doesn’t sound like that many, but being put in an entirely new environment with an entirely new slew of people who don’t know or like you for usually over a year or two was actually pretty jarring when it happened time and time again.
The new ship was called the Tulpar. She was still a fairly new vessel- only a handful of years old- and still had that novel polish. Her doors still slid with no friction, her vending machines worked the first time you tried using them, and she’d had no major mechanics issues.
He meets with his new crew for the first time a month before they’re set to leave. It’s a company-sponsored meeting, meant to encourage them to familiarize themselves with their coworkers before they’re off in space and orient them on the usual rules and procedures in the case they might have forgotten in the few months of downtime between hauls. The few pleasantries that are exchanged aren’t anything special. It’s the same song and dance he’s done over and over again- meet new people and pretend to care as if you’ll be attending the next haul afterward.
When the orientation is over, Swansea is the first to leave the building, acting as if he were in a rush. Damn stuffy Pony Express offices.
7/19/19XX - 55 YEARS
Swansea had almost been shocked when he was assigned to the Tulpar for a second haul. Admittedly, it had gone a lot smoother than with most of the other crews he’d been paired with- not that the people didn’t agitate him at all, but they didn’t step on his toes nearly as much. They gave him his peace when he needed it, and respected his boundaries and warnings typically without a hitch. It was incredibly refreshing.
When he got assigned to the Tulpar for a third haul, he found himself almost comforted by the idea. The familiarity of being back on that ship again made him dread the long hauls less, as at least he knew well what he was working with.
It’s a slow day today. There hadn’t been any big issues for him to work on, so he hadn’t had anything particular to do. For lack of anything better, he’d settled on playing Minesweeper on the laptop he’d brought onboard- he tended to default to this when he was bored, as it was a lot more engaging than anything else available, and it still made him have to think.
There was a shout from what sounded like the lounge. “Swans, could you come here real quick? I need a hand in here!” The sing-songiness of their captain’s voice echoed through the ship, reverberating off of the metal walls. With a sigh and a groan, Swansea stood, straightened his posture, and went off toward the stairs. He knew better than to think there could go a day without him having anything to tend to. Tulpar wasn’t nearly brand-new anymore. These Pony Express ships didn’t last very long, and she was already starting to wear out her welcome.
He starts to ask what the damage is when he’s cut off by the sound of a party horn. He turns from having been looking down the hallway to looking into the lounge. He freezes, stupefied, and simply stares. In front of him are all three other crew members, all in party hats with the lounge room decorated with balloons and strings of flags in all sorts of colors and a cake on the table and it doesn’t fully click with him what’s happening until he’s getting wished, collectively, a happy birthday.
When his initial shock subsides he finds himself laughing, and calls the tradition (which he’d forgotten about from the last two hauls- now, how did he forget that?) stupid but he smiles in spite of his own words. He jokes and laughs and eats that shitty, artificially sweetened cake and is only mildly disgruntled when he learns that the crew only knew when his birthday was because the nurse- a new addition from after the first haul- looked at the Pony Express medical file they had for him.
And when it was time to get back to business, good ‘ol Captain asked him to stay a moment, and handed him a keychain with a small, plush swan attached to it. A gift, decidedly- Swansea accepted it but made a pointed comment about no, he wasn’t named after a bird, it’s city, and then he says thank you anyway because regardless of how much he acts disgruntled, he appreciates the thought. A lot.
8/24/19XX - 56 YEARS
The alarms were blaring. Emergency lights flashing red as Swansea ran, panicked, for the cargo bay door. Safety protocols and lectures and the endless hazard training that Pony Express had put him through ran through his mind, protocol on loop.
In the event of a shipwide emergency, make your way to the cargo door nook! The frame for the door is one of the sturdiest structures on your ship! This is the safest place to be for collisions or attacks!
There were reasons they taught these things. Accidents happen. Ships wear down and malfunction, and not everyone exploring the stars is friendly. These explanations flick around in his mind as he gets on the floor and uses his legs to push himself up against the wall. Anya is there. Daisuke arrives a few seconds later, looking panicked and lost, and barely has time to slam his back against the wall before there is a loud crash, the sound of metal crunching and collapsing, glass shattering, and pipes bursting, a bright flash as lights overcharge and explode, and the ship jerks them all against the cargo door.
The dust settles. Swansea’s body aches. He only feels half-conscious as he fully processes what just happened.
He looks up and sees Anya and Daisuke, the former checking the latter for any injuries. Curly and Jimmy are nowhere to be seen.
He stands and squints. The emergency wall lights are the only thing illuminating the hallway, which makes looking around difficult, but he wants to survey for damage. There is foam in many cracks and crevices. Shattered glass on top of and below grated floors.
Jimmy and Curly are found in the cockpit. Jimmy mostly intact, but Curly looking already-dead, skinned alive, flayed. Jimmy asks for help pulling Curly from the foam that he had gotten stuck in, and even though Swansea can’t imagine that touch would be anything but agonizing in his current state, he helps anyway. Can’t just leave him there, he supposes.
The situation is glaringly clear to him. He can’t help but be angry. After all, what sorry excuse for a captain tries to take his entire crew down with him?
9/29/19XX - 56 YEARS
It is ‘night’time- or at least what they think is nighttime. If they’ve been keeping proper track of their time, it’s been about a month now since the crash. Swansea lay awake on his mattress next to the kitchen. He uses this time- quiet and calm- to think.
It had been easy to tell himself that they were obviously going to die here. Lightyears out in space, cockpit too damaged to send distress signals, and food supply now to last less than what the remaining time was to be for their haul now that they didn’t have the nutrition sac dispenser. It didn’t take a genius. Rationing came up, but he knew damn well nobody would care to enforce it.
He recognizes, with great self awareness, that he hasn’t fully let the thought set in yet. He knows he will die at some point on this ship. Within the next half-year, he figures. But the severity of it has not yet fully registered in his mind. He’s still kicking, still fighting, still surviving as if it meant anything at all. They all were. Especially their captain, mangled and burned as he was.
Swansea considered briefly, at a point, killing himself. He wasn’t sure how much time it would buy to have one less person eating, one less person breathing and living in this craft, and ultimately figured it was negligible. It’d most likely be over a year, maybe two before help reached them. and that’s assuming they grow suspicious of the off-schedule freighter in the first place.
He wonders about his wife. She doesn’t know yet. Won’t for half a year. He’ll be dead by the time that she even considers that he might be. He wonders what she’ll do when he doesn’t return. Wonders how she’ll go about the rest of her life without him. Maybe she’d find someone new to keep her company. He wonders how his kids will react when they’re told he never made it back. When they’re told his body is unrecovered because it costs too much to send a ship all that way just to pick up a tin can with a pile of corpses inside.
He remembers Utility. He’s managed to keep everyone else out, but he’s seen inside. There is only one cryostasis pod left. This information is to be disclosed incredibly selectively, though this is primarily to keep their new ‘captain’ from hearing of it. He knows the kind of person he is. The way he immediately took the title of ‘Captain’ forcefully and abruptly from the mangled arms of Curly. There is selfishness there that Swansea can almost recognize in himself. He has a strong hunch that the man would take it for himself, or even break it so nobody could use it at all, everything under the guise of ‘fair leadership’.
Swansea coughs, sighs, then turns onto his side.
All thoughts, no action, nothing to do. It makes him antsy. Fidgety. He’s so used to constantly having things to do on these ships. Repairs, clean-ups, troubleshooting, the works, but this ship was beyond saving. There was nothing left to be done. Removing the foam is incredibly risky- nothing to be repaired that can be repaired. He had to stick to his story and leave his tools at his desk, so the only thing that he could do was sit around and assess the deterioration of the ship as it crumpled in on itself, watch the fire from inside the house.
Swansea grits his teeth then screws his eyes shut, and forces himself to actively think of nothing.
11/XX/19XX - 56 YEARS
Swansea is drunk.
The familiar embrace of the alcohol in his blood carries him to a sort of feverishness. He almost can’t believe that he let himself drink again, but keeps going back to the thought at the front of his mind- nowhere else to be. He wonders in a distant, disconnected way if maybe there really is a god, and what he’d done to deserve this cruel joke if there was, but laughs by way of an exhale through the nose as soon as the thought gets through his daze and rattles into his brain. It’s a stupid question. It’s not difficult to imagine that any godly being would be repulsed by him, gluttonous, greedy, overindulgence incarnate. He’d almost let it ruin his life before, and now he’s letting it carry him to his grave, welcoming it with open arms.
Nowhere else to be.
He can’t remember how long it’d been since they’d opened the cargo hold. The ‘days’ and ‘nights’ blend together, disjointed and hazy, marked only by the periodical breaks of lucidity noting whether more people are awake or more are asleep. He’d sit and drink and people-watch- eavesdrop on conversations, watch as they read books, lifted weights, played Sorry- then go make sure nobody had managed to force Utility open and sit there to keep guard.
The rest of the crew don’t involve him in much anymore. He doesn’t blame them. He’s obnoxious, only half-there, it’s grating. He’d heard as much a long, long time ago, and the way he’d get ignored tells him that those words still stand. Nothing quite feels real anymore, but he isn’t sure if it’s from the alcohol, his own brain, or a lethal combination of both. He’s numbed to the world wholly, lets himself drift and only returns when either sobriety or frustration drags him down with serrated claws.
He knows it’s wrong, knows he should face his fate with bared teeth, but he cannot bring himself to care. It won’t matter when he dies.
ethereality
Swansea is sitting in an open field, grass stretching out in all directions for miles. It’s sunset- or at least he thinks it is. The field is bathed in golden light the whole way through, though when he looks straight up, the sky is dark and full of stars.
He reaches his hand down to run it through the grass, tilting his head to the side slightly. He’s glad to be home. The earth beneath him is solid and soft and does not clang or thump or make hollow sounds when it’s stepped on. It’s reassuring. He laughs. God knows he needs the reassurance.
He breathes in and the air is cool from the gentle breeze swaying by him, and slowly lowers himself to laying down with a grunt. He can feel his muscles relax and he gets the sharp urge- just as a tear stings his eye- to cry.
He misses this. There is wind running over him, solid, sturdy ground, there is fresh air, and there is hope. He doesn’t have to do anything here. There is nothing to guard, nothing to protect. No foam, no blood, no viscera and no goddamn mouthwash, no, everything here is okay.
It’s not real, of course, he knows this, but it’s comforting. It invokes that same feeling as catching a whiff of some scent you know from your childhood. He wishes he could stay here forever. He knows he can’t.
The second that the dread comes, it slips through his fingers. The dirt crumbles and dissolves underneath him, the grass turning to dust at the slightest touch, and he is dropped into the cavernous mouth of the ground and spat right out into open space.
XX/XX/19XX - 56 YEARS
The first thing that hits him is the headache. It splits open his skull, like some parasite trying to wriggle its way in and settle under his brain. Everything hurts. He slowly drags himself up, clammy and sweaty and the nausea hits him like a wave, hitting his gag reflex hard and making him vomit. It’s bright teal and pink and burns hot coming back up, and Swansea is so exhausted after having choked it up that he almost leans back and lays down again. He quickly glances around to see if anyone had seen his minute of shame, and has to do a double-take upon seeing that the door to Utility is open.
He can feel the rest of what little remains in his stomach fall right into a pit of dread. That’s bad. He’d locked it, hadn’t he? He reaches to feel for his key, and realizes that it’s gone as well. This was wrong. He’d always kept his key right there in his pocket, attached to his belt loop by the keyring. He shakes from the effort that it takes to sit up, groaning as if it might relieve any of the aching that his body was marinating in.
He staggers to his feet and almost falls right back over, lightheaded either from the alcohol in his system or the lack of food in his stomach. He hears something like whimpering and crying echoing through the vessel and he puts in all the effort he has to drag his feet upstairs and investigate.
The blood meets his eyes before anything else. There are pools of it just around the corner of their foamed-over kitchen nook and he knows immediately what has happened.
The next hour or so is a blur. He’s still drunk, he knows that much, and he knows that he found out why, and he has to swallow his fervor to try to look for anything else that could help him, at least try to save that bright-eyed twenty-something writhing and gagging in pain on his own mattress.
(He knows, deep down, that there isn’t anything to be done anymore. Nothing to do but watch this collapse, too.)
go ahead, watch your little trainwreck. you know you saw this coming.
Swansea’s ears ring as he looks down at his handiwork. He feels sick to his stomach. His senses are dulled- he feels unreal. The young man’s skull is caved in, the blade of the axe stuck square in the center of his face, flesh and blood pooling around it, lapping at the edges. There’s a short shouting match between him and the only other ‘lucid’ crew member still alive. He doesn’t internalize it. It isn’t important.
It is quiet on the Tulpar. The slowly dying systems within the spacecraft leave it chilly inside, cold and stagnant, he finally comes back into his own head. He looks around. Jimmy is gone. The screen-window now permanently shattered burns a giant warning sign into his retinas. He squints.
He wrenches the axe out of his intern’s skull with a sickening crunch. It feels heavier in his hands now, and as he lifts it to hold it in both hands, one directly under the head, he can feel the blood trickle down to touch base on his hand, frigid and sticky.
There isn’t anything left for him. He has nothing else to be doing. He’d said as much. The last thing that he had been fighting for was long gone, now.
Well, there was one last thing he could do.
be careful, it’s a big universe out there.
A breeze blows by. Cold, fresh air fills Swansea’s lungs. The stars surround him, though there is still ground under his feet. Blinking his eyes open, he begins to walk. The ground changes under his feet as he goes, and his view can never go more than maybe ten feet before dissolving into stardust and celestial bodies. In spite of everything, the breeze keeps sweeping over him, carrying with it the faintest smell of earth and sea.
The first landmark appears on his left. An old abandoned schoolhouse. It’s vaguely familiar, though undoubtedly it’s been awhile since he’d seen a place like it. It’s entirely overgrown with plants and vines. An elm grows straight through the middle of where its roof had collapsed decades ago. Grass brushes his ankles, and he finds himself compelled to check his legs for ticks.
The second comes up on his right. Some old burger joint. It’s currently closed and very defunct, likely having gone bankrupt many years back. In spite of being a few paces away from a kudzu-reclaimed schoolhouse, this one is mostly untouched by plant life. Nothing grows from the cracks in the sidewalk under Swansea’s feet save for the occasional ant hill.
There’s a mattress in an alcove of tall, dry grasses ahead of him, torn to shreds by the forces of nature. Past it, small drifts of snow along the edges of pavement, a bar somewhere to his right. Swansea walks past the bar. The snowy terrain doesn’t let up even as the bar fades into the distance behind me.
Another bar appears in the distance, on Swansea’s right. He walks past the bar. He keeps his eyes trained on his feet, kicking up the snow with every step that he takes. He’s freezing. He looks up again to look at the building slowly approaching him from a distance. He keeps walking. He walks past the bar.
When Swansea takes his eyes off of his feet, they dart near-immediately to the horizon. There are no more stars. Only deep, primordial blackness.
Swansea keeps walking. He walks past the bar. He continues on for another fifteen minutes before he passes the bar again and stops in his tracks. The world around him hadn’t just lost its starriness, it had gone dark. The total absence of light. Sweet, sweet oblivion.
Swansea breathes heavily then looks up into the streetlights.
The searing pain of the light shoots into his skull, and when he opens his eyes again, he’s not there anymore. He’s at home. His wife is in the kitchen, humming some soft tune while she pulls the tea bags out of a fully-steeped pitcher and grabs the sugar.
Maeve?
When he calls out to her, she takes a second to respond (as she usually does). She looks up from the sweet tea that she has almost finished brewing and locks eyes with her husband.
And she smiles.
It is wholly disarming, and Swansea relaxes so thoroughly that he slumps forward a bit. He walks forward to lean against the other side of the kitchen counter.
“Welcome back, hon.” She leans on the counter as well so that they’re face-to-face. “Long trip?”
Hah. Swansea rolls his eyes. You wouldn’t know the half of it.
She snickers at his remark, then sighs. She turns her head to let her eyes fall back on the pitcher of tea brewing. Swansea’s own smile falls.
This is it, then, huh?
Her brow pinches in empathetic sorrow. “I mean… yeah. Pretty much.” She tilts her head to the side slightly and starts to idly twist a small lock of her hair between her fingers. “Not right this moment, but you’re not very far off.”
He offers a dry exhale of a laugh. You know, we did have that conversation. Years back. He can’t help the smile that starts tugging at the corners of his mouth again. He misses her. A lot. You said you always thought I’d die by takin’ a bullet for someone.
She laughs along with him, a low, fond sound that sticks to the inside of his mind like glue. “Didn’t think the bullet part would be so... literal, honestly, you know?”
XX/XX/XXXX - 56 YEARS
The rope digs tightly into his wrists. There is a radiating, pulsating pain emanating from a wound in his upper trapezius. He counts his breaths. He looks up.
Jimmy, with the emergency firearm, maybe five feet in front of him. The younger man held it clutched in both hands as if letting it go would kill him. There was a manic look in his eyes, and it didn’t take the bindings around his limbs for him to know that these were going to be his last moments.
His strength was waning from the blood loss already sustained- a bullet wound through the clavicle didn’t exactly do much for him- but he was nothing if not a fighter. So he did what he could. Try to get something through that skull of his trembling ‘Captain’, make a point, come to peace with himself.
His swan song. The idea would have elicited a small laugh in a better situation. His age-old argument of it’s not from the bird, it’s from a city flickered through his mind, and though he had hated repeating it months ago, he almost wished for someone to repeat it to now. Some kind of comfort, some kind of respite in the back of his own head, but knows that it will not come and he does not have the time for it.
He lays himself bare. He knows that he was a terrible type of animal. Knows that he still is. But he tried in earnest to be what the world wanted of him. And he’d done good on that front. He’d fought back into sobriety, he’d found someone to love, built a home and raised his kids best he could, but it is a staggeringly fragile balancing act. One moment of weakness, and the image that he tried so desperately to paint of himself shattered. One fall, one relapse.
But he’s at peace with this. It’s only a matter of time with these things. He knows what kind of animal he is. Forever shackled to chemical indulgence.
And at the end of the day, he’s okay with it. It’s not comfortable to admit, more like a confession than stating a fact, but if you can’t change it, you might as well settle with it.
So when his despondent captor tells him everything will be okay, he laughs, and barks out his last obscenities.
And when the deep black eye of death stares Swansea in the face, all he does is glare. Past the barrel of the gun, and into the eyes of what used to be a man, now long gone. It makes the man hesitate, if only for a split second, before he fires right into his eye.