Chapter Text
Prologue
February 3rd, 2248
The Horizon Sun
He watched the sparks falling. Orange trails, bright white at the bottom, then nothing; they disappeared before they hit the decking. Watched them fall; he caught a fragment of thought that they were pretty, but then it was gone. He didn't move. Just watched them erupt, trail, fall, vanish.
There was smoke in the air, too; another fragment, the shipyards and the Lady Grey, but this didn't smell like woodsmoke. Smelled like electricity. Like metal.
Where was he?
He tried to remember for a moment, but then the question slipped away, like a breeze through his fingers. He didn't try to move, just watched. It hurt to breathe. Why did it hurt to breathe?
It was dark. Somewhere, buried, under the pain and under the mental fog, he could hear the low, uneasy thrum through the deckplates and knew that it was wrong. Impulse engines were under strain. The regulations systems were bypassed, forcing the engines to operate outside of their safety margins.
Who did that? he wondered, abstractly.
Oh. Wait. He did.
Didn't he?
He didn't remember.
More sparks fell. Pretty; orange trails, white pinpoints which looked like falling stars, then nothing. He watched them passively, quietly, not moving. He couldn't move. It hurt to breathe. His whole body hurt, but most of it was centered in his side and hip, crushing pain, enough that it sent his mind skipping across broken bits of thought before he could actually grasp any of those pieces. More pain in his right shoulder, which he was laying on, and that was a damp, sticky, sharp pain.
Where was he?
He wasn't sure. He tried to remember how he got here. What happened? He wasn't scared. It hurt, he was shivering, but he wasn't scared. He didn't think he had been scared when it happened, whatever it was.
He blinked a couple times, drowsily, watching the sparks. He felt sick, too. Cold down to the bone. Dizzy. It hurt, and there were long moments where that was all he actually knew; just pain, overwhelming, sending his mind skittering across the broken pieces into nothingness. The same amount of pain, but sometimes he could see past it to the sparks.
What happened?
He tried to remember for a moment, but couldn't. Different light now; blue-white. He couldn't seem to hear anything correctly; everything sounded muffled and distant. Blue-white light, moving. It wasn't as pretty as the sparks raining down. He barely noted it; only noted it for real when something came between him and the sparks he was watching, and he rallied then only briefly to look at the blur of blue and white light and a face.
He didn't see the concern on the face, or hear the reassurance in the tone. All he saw was a flash of something silver and he knew what that was--
In a single heartbeat, pain didn't matter, nothing mattered but escape, and he was fighting to get away from the flash even though that made the hurt hit a peak that drove what last remnants of thought he had right out of his head, but it didn't matter because he had to get away, had to fight, had to-- had to-- get away, get away now , escape, run, get--
Something else, living, tried to stop him, but he didn't hear the shouting and didn't-- he had to run or fight, right now, get away--
--there was a brief, sharp pressure against his neck and a hiss, and he knew then that he was trapped, and that there was no way out, and the very last thing he was aware for was a broken, terrified sob that he couldn't help.
And then nothing.