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He should be dead.
The doctors suctioned fluid from his lungs, fighting to keep him alive as it slowly choked him out. They suctioned blood from his brain from a concussive wound. He had shattered part of his ribs, and was suffering from acute radiation poisoning that had taken a massive medication regime on overtasked machines to fixed.
He had been down there for days, on a sub that should have run out of oxygen.
He’d lost part of his arm, and a good amount of blood before that.
He should be dead.
And yet. He still lived.
It was an almost bizarre thought, to see him sitting so quiet on the med bay cot. Staring into the little pendant he held above his eyes with shaking hands. Or just one shaking hand now.
She couldn’t help but think of how wrong it looked, not to see him covered in blood, his skin cracked and bleeding. When she had cracked open the failing welds, pulled him out of there, she had thought he was already dead.
And then his eyes had fluttered. He had whispered something, too low to catch. Maybe not even a whisper, but a groan of pain.
He was fighting so hard to live.
He clung to it. Life. With bloody nails, and teeth, fighting so hard for the next moment, the next breath.
She nearly crashed the submersible to get to the surface. Counting the faint breaths, the ever so slight rise and fall, hidden under sodden clothes and bleeding skin. She’d almost forgotten the black box.
Her crew thought she was crazy now. That the radiation fried her brain, not just her internals, not just daily medicine and med bay visits until the doctors were satisfied that they had cured her. They eyed her in hallways, and David had looked mutinous.
And maybe a bit relieved. It had been… taxing. To kill somebody slowly, to listen to the begging. And to finally have someone return alive. He had wanted so badly to live.
And now he had.
“I thought.” He said. His voice was cracked, with a rasp that wasn’t there before. Too much screaming, the doctor had said. “I was going to die down there.”
Someone had gotten his clothes cleaned, or at least some of the bloodstains out. The stains had been wiped from his skin and in the bed, he almost looked normal again. And then you saw the crack in his eyes.
“You fought a lot for someone who believed that.” She said. “You drove a pretty hard bargain for it.”
“We don’t always get what we want.” He said, staring at the pendant. The little, perfect thing. She had fixed the glass, when she saw it cracked. It felt right. She knew some good pieces of glass, too small to be usable to anyone else. Somehow, the little sprout inside was still whole, still untouched by the blood.
“I told you we are too few now to throw anything away.” She said. It’s what got her this far as Captain, stubbornly dragging herself towards hope.
“Sure, sure.” The pendant fell to the side, his hand falling to the mattress. Neither look at his missing arm, the sleeve tucked around it. “You weren’t planning on lying again.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
It was easy, once they were welded in. Just voices. Just bloodstained faces through the viewing glass. She always cleaned the glass. It was a farce, a play, at pretending that she didn’t stare through and think that that was their blood, staining their face, already dead behind the glass and they didn’t know it yet.
“I thought about it.” She said. She had stood in front of the iron lung, as they called them (the execution boxes as others called them when they thought she wasn’t listening), and thought about insanity. Even if he hadn’t planned Filament Station, completed it, there was blood on his hands.
They knew there was something alive down there, something dangerous. He should have been dead hours ago, days ago. The blood ocean was dangerous, shifting unpredictably, and she would plunge herself in on the mere gamble she would somehow make it out alive.
To rescue someone sent there to die.
“I told you, that you would be free.” She said. The thought had played in her mind. She promised he would be free. How hard he fought to leave. How he kept apologizing, over and over, for the camera. “I meant it.”
Insanity, she had thought as Jack had welded her in, David supporting him. Insanity, she thought as she sunk into the blood.
But he wanted to leave and she wanted him to live.
“I keep thinking I’m still down there.” He said, and his voice cracked. “That this is some dying hallucination.”
“There are better places to hallucinate.” She said, looking around the slapdash med bay. It was improving, ever so slowly. They had a direction now. That black box data, it had spurred new hope, feverish hope. For once, they actually had something solid.
Maybe a way to fix this, whole thing.
And somehow, that got a smile. A tiny one. A faint one. “Yeah. I can think of a few.”
They all could.
She pushes herself up, off the med bay cot. There were things to do still. Some stations wanted to look at the data brought back. This had been a landmark mission and everyone wanted a piece of a pie. Or vultures fighting over scraps. She had had many long days and many more ahead of her, what passed for days here in this place with no sunlight.
Already, she can think of next tasks, next goals.
“Do you still dream of it?” She hears behind her. “The blood. The heat. The noise.”
She closes her eyes.
She didn’t dream of that. She dreamed of faces through a porthole, screaming over the radio.
There were more than three at their station. She had cut the docking crew to a skeleton as people begged off, begged her to send them away. To not have to send them back down there.
She dreamed of it, still.
“Yes.”
A pause. “Me too.”
“I’d refer you to a therapist but I don’t think any of them are equipped to untangle that.” She said. She didn’t think she was equipped to untangle that. She had seen a mere fragment, and she could still smell the old, coppery smell, the sickening feel of the drips against skin.
The door slid open with a soft rasp, cool air rushing in. Fresh air, clean.
“Ava.” She paused, one hand on the doorway. “Thank you. I just wanted to live.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Simon.”