Starfire

Chapter 14: -What if...?-

   Najma received orders early the next morning. He had been stationed in their singular operational hangar, and though he knew it wasn't the one in which he had fought, he couldn't keep the bloody memories from his mind every time he gazed at the familiar layout. Day after day, he'd arrive mechanically on time and go through the motions of directing the ships seeking passage into the belly of the Intrepid. Watching from high within a glass box, it seemed a different world than the one he had helped invade.

Three other soldiers occupied the other stations in the booth, calling out acceptance or denial into their intercoms, asking questions or requesting the proper paperwork before passage was permitted. Pages and pages of endless docking information blurred past on the screens imbedded into their desks. The silvery Laurangin, Mur, sat closest to Najma. Next to him was the brooding Sauger, who had not yet revealed her name to Najma. She was an icy, formidable soldier with a missing hand. Nama had, more than once, caught her blood-red eyes watching him. It never failed to give him chills. The last hangar operator was a brown-scaled reptilian alien that Najma didn't recognize or simply couldn't name, with a pattern of shifting, mesmerizing diamonds along its scales. Its name was Dellatt, and it sat farthest from Najma.

He kept his distance from all of them, but he couldn't help but notice, half-bitterly, when they began to form their own connections. Even the Sauger seemed to drop a few layers of mistrust. Najma was almost sure that he'd spotted a smile, once or twice, but was never fully able to convince himself, especially after another of her famous glares.

The biggest surprise came when, eventually, the news trickled down the ladder that Garter had been usurped. Well, not in so many words, but as the ranks of the Alliance filled out with the recruits that had trooped in from all over the Quadrant to answer Garter's call, a system and order of business was slowly starting to be put in place. One of the first acts of this new council was to take Garter down from her seat of power. She had been just the right leader, in just the right place, at just the right time to take over in the unfortunate wake of the devastation of Yu-Liang, but now she was willingly stepping down in favor of those better suited to the job of reining during a time of peace, and keeping it stable.

Najma didn't believe it. Sitting in his room after another monotonous day directing space traffic, he came close to working himself up to seeking her out and demanding she tell him what really happened. She wouldn't step down willingly, no matter how much power she still held as one of the many council members. But then he remembered how weary she'd looked during their meeting, and as if that wasn't enough on its own, it was soon followed by the bitter reminder that she wasn't the villain he'd hoped she'd turn out to be.

She was smart. Of course she'd recognize that her violent cunning wasn't the style that a peaceful organization would need. He assuaged his disappointment at being so wrong by telling himself that she'd made sure she secured a high enough pedestal to remain a major player when the universe as they knew it collapsed into her foreseen madness.

He shook his head and forced every thought from his head, choosing instead to lay down and try for a head start on sleep. It was really just wishful thinking to hope for a night of rest, though.

Now that his tumultuous thoughts and feelings had managed to settle from the rapid-fire events immediately following the death of his species, and since there was nothing new happening, all he had was the past. But no matter how long he tried to linger on the earliest memories, more... recent events won out with all the horrifying violence in which they had occurred in reality.

At night, he would drift amidst a field of debris, trapped and frozen, eyes unable to close as he watched the world around him fall apart. Fallen Alliance and Intrepid soldiers floated alongside the scorched carcasses of his mother, father, and the many lost souls of Yu-Liang. Or he was running on an infinite battlefield, only to soon realize that he was really just one of the corpses, still moving when it should have stayed, half-buried in other bodies.