I am feeling guilty again.
Surprise!
Said no one ever.
If there is one thing that defines me, Admiral Adam Vir of the UNSC, it is my extreme propensity to guilt.
I think about how cold his hand was in mine as I stood over his hospital bed. I had tried t make a joke, like all awkward stupid people do, and he laughed, not because my joke was funny but because I was so damn awkward.
It seems strange now, everything that has happened, and thinking about him I feel only the rapture of guilt squeezing my chest. I did that to him, I'm the reason he lies in that hospital bed even after the injection is done.
Life has never been kind to my brother, as a great philosopher once said life is soup, my brother is a fork.
All joking aside, years and years of drug use weakened his heart and now its damaged.
Of course, I offered to fix it for him, I have more than enough money to pay for them to grow him a new heart. Hell, I would have given him mine if I thought he would take it., but I can't forget his sad smile as he took my hand and told me it was alright. He wasn't really meant to be a marine anyway.
I didn't understand, and I still don't. He might as well be speaking Klingon, except for the fact that if he WAS speaking Klingon than I would still understand him better than I do now.
And yes I speak Klingon, is anyone surprised?
He says he wants to go into drug counseling. I don't understand why he would choose not to get better with that option open, and he tells me its finally time to face the consequences of what he has done. I think its perfectly stupid, but he is my brother, and he is adamant about it.
I will miss having family aboard my ship.
Krill saved us, surprising no one, with a vaccine that.... Camouflaged us against the void. I don't know how it works, but mixed adaptid and lumin DNA put together.
Krill tells me that my pretty little soldier brain doesn't need to understand it, and I shrug and let him have his superiority. He earned it
The good news is Now I am not the only one.
Adaptid DNA runs in all of us, and the side effects are still unknown.
It didn't totally cure us of course, but Krill explained it like the chicken pox. The void sickness is inert but still present, we can't infect other people, but we can have.... Flare ups? Or he thinks we can.
I am the reason he thinks this.
I splash water into my face feeling the cool liquid run over my skin and down my jaw onto my neck. It makes the collar of my shirt unpleasantly wet as I lift my head and brace my hands against the sink. I have... trouble... looking at myself, seeing what I have become, but I force myself to look, to take in the man that stands before me in the mirror.
He doesn't look much like me anymore.
The eyepatch is the same, a part of my personality now, my remaining green eye is the same, my face is the same, for the most part,
The big differences?
The spiderwebbing of glowing veins that circles my bad eye and crawls their way down my neck.
Its like when you were in school and some kid would have a really bad cold soar and everyone would make fun of that kid for having Herpes.... Well now I have space herpes.
Leave it to me.
It is a mark of my status as infected, as patient zero to the space herpes. Krill thinks it will fade with time, but he also has a theory that, for me, it's a stress response, like someone breaks out in shingles on occasion if they have had chicken pox in the past. So yeah I have space shingles.... On my face.
I reach up a hand to trace the pulsing orange lines.
Even captain Kirk didn't have space herpes.... And lord knows he certainly should have.
I guess I am being a bit dramatic with that description of course, but I can't help how I feel, or maybe I can, but I am choosing to be willingly difficult. Then there is the worse part, the part that isn't going to fade with time.
My hair.
I was greying before, it's a genetic thing in my family. Grandad was grey at thirty five and my father started going grey in his early thirties too.
I have gone white.
I was a blond before all this started and the hair has lost all of its pigment. I've been going grey for a while, a few years actually, but Krill says the void sped up the process tenfold.
So now my hair is white, from the back I look like an old man, and when I put on my admiral's uniform it fits me now.
I actually look like an admiral.
As if to ad insult to injury even my eyebrows and eyelashes have gone white.
And before you ask
Yes
I have gone grey.
Everywhere.
Don't worry Ramirez already asked
I heard somewhere once that body hair is less likely to go grey than head hair and sometimes it doesn't..... not for me.
I am "lucky.
I thought my mother would cry when she saw me, but she didn't.
I did.
Been doing a lot of that lately, and I am damn drained. My biggest concern, however, was Sunny.
Would she still love me after all of this?
It was a stupid question.
Finally stepping out of that bubble she didn't even give me a second look. She hugged me, and I can still remember her body pressed against mine, the pressure of her hands as she gripped my arms, the cool of her chitin as I ran my hand down her back.
I am a stupid man.
Stupid for thinking shed care.
Stupid for caring.
I realize now what I have to do, and after all that has happened, I regret not having allowed myself to think of it earlier. For the longest time I have been denying parts of myself unconsciously , but now all of that seems inconsequential against what we now know about the universe. Everything that mattered before seems so pointless now, all of those little things washed away.
I can finally see what is important.
And I feel like an idiot.
It's pretty much a constant state of my being these days.
My hands tremble with nerves.
I feel like I'm going to throw up.
My thoughts are slow and stupid,
What should I wear?'
***
And so the sun rises casting long shadows over an alien world splayed out before my feet like a conquered kingdom, and I hum at the thought. Closing my eyes I lift my head to a sun that is not mine, not Chal, not the star I was named for, but its warmth still heats my blood and the metal at my hands. I have survived again.
If my mother were here, I might have laughed in her face.
Fate doesn't want me dead, fate is my friend and companion, and I will keep it at my side like an earth dog, as a pet and a companion, potentially dangerous, but a creature that choses to love me anyway.
Like most things on earth.
Like earth itself
Humans don't believe that their planet has a soul, and in accordance with what we have learned about the universe recently, maybe it doesn't, but I still feel that it does, just like I feel that Anin does. Anin is fiery, but cold and distant, she is a monolith who looks down upon the children cradled in her fertile lands. She loves from a distance.
Earth Loves fast and violently, quick to anger and quick to cool. She deals in love and punishment with equal measure, her fury is unbounded but so is her love.
And her children are the same.
They learned to behave from her.
They misbehave like she does.
They love like she does.
I turn away from the sun and look at my shadow which stretches back over the ground.
And I see him standing behind me leaning against a spear like a cane.
We can't return home yet, as krill is still unsure about the vaccination side effects, but here on this terraformed moon, we have privacy, and sunlight, which Krill says is important.
"Why aren't you wearing a shirt?" I ask
I am pleased when he blushes, I love it when he does that, he hates it, but its just so easy I cannot help myself,
He's adorable when he's embarrassed.
He'd be even more embarrassed if he knew how easily I could spot it.
Drev color differentiation is superior after all.
Despite his embarrassment, he does a passable job at responding nonchalantly, "And you're completely naked, so I don't think you have the right to ask questions."
I flex all four of my arms, "Why would I hide a body like mine."
He rolls his eyes.
I take his momentary distraction as time to peruse the muscles of his chest and back.
I find that I am.... Rather fond of human musculature.
Or at least this human.
I also find myself very partial to scars.
Like trophies for battles won.
And he has a lot of scars.
A lot....
He catches me looking at him, I LET him catch me, just to watch the blood flood back into his face.
I'm mean to him.
But I can't help myself.
You have to let a saint have a little bit of fun.
"My eyes are up here."
"Oh I know, and I'll get to those in a minute." I refuse to loo kat his face just to annoy him, but he steps closer forcing me to look down into his face.
He is three quarters of a foot shorter than me. We lock eyes. He doesn't look at me the way I look at him, but I don't mind.
He's more tactile than he is visual. He runs a hand down my arm.
If I was human I might have gotten goosebumps, and even so I shiver slightly .
"It's been a while, since I've gotten to kick your ass." He says
I scoff, "YOU kick MY ass, Hardly."
"Deny it all you want saint of the sun, but, we all know who is superior here."
I rest a hand on the side of his face. His human skin is warm and soft. Little veins of orange light ring his bad eye, and he unconsciously tries to pull away as I examine them. I keep him where he is as I brush my thumb over his cheekbones and then into his hairline.
His hair is white now.
Its unusual for a human his age.
I like it.
Its
Beautiful.
He can't see it the way I do, but it seems to refract an array of light in a spectrum of colors, not like it did before. He says his hair went white because of stress, this makes me like it even more, not because he is stressed, but because it is a sign of all the things he has survived. Like a scar.
"Are you challenging me to a fight?" I ask
"Yes I am." He pulls away and with the but of his spear he carves a crude circle in the dirt. I watch him as he does leaning against my own spear.
When he is done he steps across the circle from me. A wind rolls through his white hair as he spreads his feet to shoulder width. I step across from him and do the same.
It is a good morning to fight.
He looks at me, and I wonder what stance he is going to take. Maybe one of the old ones, like fire or water.... Or maybe he will play to his strengths using the human technique I developed. Maybe he will try to trick me and use none.
He smiles at me.
It's a smile I have not seen before.
Nervous but....
Smug.
Its consuming.
He stands straight out of his crouch, and with a nonchalant flick of his hand he tosses his spear to the side and allows it to thud onto the ground with a puff of dirt which clouds into the air.
I stare at him in confusion.
He points a hand at me.
"Chalan Lanusdaughter, I challenge you to the right of unarmed combat."