Work Text:
There is a needle. The needle is very close to your face. 4.57 CM away, your suit helpfully provides. Close enough that it hurts to try to focus on it.
There is a hand, vice-like, crushing your arm, holding you in place. The Korvax is repeating something over and over in a voice you can barely comprehend, let alone understand. Self preservation tells you to fight, but exhaustion holds your bones.
It speaks again. The needle is now pressed against your forehead, halted with unnatural precision before penetrating the dermis.
It speaks again, sounding louder without actually increasing its volume, the noise crowding your brain like static. Is it trying to kill you? Trying to help? Were such paltry motivations irrelevant to the Convergence?
Is this how you die? Why does it feel so familiar?
You try to see your reflection in the smooth black surface of the Korvax’s face, to see if you look the way you remember, if you’d be able to recognize your own corpse, but the screen must be absorbing photons. You see only void, more comforting and familiar to you than anything else. It is the space between stars and planets you’ve traveled, between you and your ship and this Korvax and this breath and the next.
You can't die here.
You can't die.
You close your eyes. The needle goes in.