Work Text:
Many hours, countless hours, leagues beneath the sea.
You knew, rather distantly, that you would not be seeing the stars again as you turned your back away from the light, allowing yourself to be welded shut in a submarine to be hurled into the deep below.
Oxygen runs thin, the air thick with sweltering heat, your mind racing from the wild unknowns. A deep thrum, a hollow noise, the ever-present beep of something nearby.
You guide yourself with a shoddy map made by victims of days past, pressing your palm onto the dim, glowing blue button. Click—a grainy picture; a meld of bones of unknown origin with a faint backdrop of industrial human-make.
It's eerie, yet quietly you do not acknowledge. It is not your mystery to unfold, you are a passenger to your own epilogue.
"Oxygen."
One bar now, your eyes flick from the numbers to the persistent green meter. A primal anxiety cradles your heart. You keep trudging forward. The submarine creaks, groans, under the weight of the blood ocean.
Click—voices. A bright, white light appears on the feed, visibly moving despite you having taken a picture.
It whispers to you, quiet, lovely things. It wishes your commitment, your loyalty. Begs for your forgiveness, pleads for the apathy, rages for the unanswer.
Your submarine backs away, spinning in a circle and leaving without a word spoken to the hallucinating. It is not your mystery.
Blood drips now, from the roof of the vehicle down to the thick rusty flooring. It falls at a consistent rate, soon pooling at your feet, soaking the thin soles completely.
Your mind begins to wander. It wanders to the elusive past you once held so dearly, to the tree you so lovingly gazed upon as a child. To the mother that held you so sweetly. To the grandfather that slapped your wrists so harshly.
It's all... such a distant dream now. Gazing into the stars, watching them fade with a blink of an eye. People rushing, terrified, unable to contact their loved ones on the missing planet below; vanished like a blip.
The fight for survival, the fear of the unknown, the indomitable human spirit. The explosion, the capture, the large holding cell consisting of only you. The distant quakes of the space station quietly tumbling through empty space. The stern urgency of the lady's voice, telling you that you'd be free if you did this one thing. The soldering, the welding shut. The sinking, the closing, the isolation, the loneliness.
The arrival, the picture—the nonexistence.