Work Text:
It started with a gasp, soft yet sharp.
White hot pain followed,
all-consuming, numbing
her brain from fully understanding its depth.
She’d been here before,
Teetering on the precipice.
(Floating in space
as her pricked oxygen recycler hissed.
Struggled respiration.
In and out.)
Holding the same finality;
just slower this time.
No point in clawing at her back to close the gap;
she had nothing left to bargain with.
Vertigo stirred
as she fought to look beyond the stars
that danced behind her lids.
Gray rebar and deconstructed city blocks met her,
blurred as the world spun on its axis.
Dust settled around her,
hollow and resonant rattles.
Above, below, and all around;
pressing into her.
Sharp and dull,
everything and nothing,
all at the same time.
Each sound, muffled.
Each touch, delayed.
Contorting her body,
which moved an inch for a mile of effort,
she tried to shift into a more comfortable position.
The sickly sweet smell of death
surrounded her.
An ironic nauseation—
just how familiar the smell was.
Death was two warm hands
enveloping her open fist
with weight.
Her helmet laid heavy beside her,
along with the bodies of her men.
Figurative and literal,
the blood and dirt caked under
her nails,
marked into the grooves and calluses
of her palms.
She twitched a blood-soaked finger,
reaching for something—
anything.
An unceremonious desperation.
Each breath became harder
to take in
than the last,
something in her chest rattled.
Adrenaline faded
and shock began to take hold,
each sensation pricking sharply.
That inexplicable feeling
she’d carried with her from the womb
remained inexplicable as she laid,
swaddled and cocooned,
in the rubble.
(There was a moment of clarity she’d had
as her oxygen depleted
in the unforgiving vastness of space.
A small moment that stretched on
as her convulsing ceased.
Nothing intelligible,
just a soaked warmth—
spreading from the crown of her head,
to the nape of her neck,
and down her spine.
The debris of her ship,
metal on fire juxtaposed
to the icy planet’s surface beyond it;
she remembered its beauty in that false crescendo.)
It had all been over from the beginning.
It was out of her blood-soaked hands now.
Ragged breaths slowed
as she took in the view of London’s sunrise
peering over the rubble,
sedentary fires burning out.
It was beautiful.
You did good, child,
you did good.
Vague steel-toed footfalls,
concrete clacking together.
A figure enveloping the space above her.
“Another body.”
A second pair of heavy boots.
“This one’s got tags,
it isn’t a civilian.”
Silence, then a gasp.
Soft yet sharp.
“Holy shit,”
the first man’s voice was much closer now.
“It’s her.”
In and out.