The Days After

What happened in the dark space between the destruction of the Earth and the Arcadia's rebirth? Explores the missing moments in the 2013 movie, and is set wholly in the bounds of that universe.

Legends are born of Time. Faint whisperings around dying fires. Stories told to children in the unformed limbo between waking and sleeping. And sometimes, like now, spoken in hushed tones across a table in a sparsely populated bar.

Harlock didn't turn at the mention of his name, but he couldn't avoid the curling of his lip when the story-teller branded him deserter, the word somehow louder, the voice bolder, than it had been before. His gaze moved from the moisture-stained bar to the mirrored wall beyond, fingers tightening around the empty glass in his grip. The reflection in the mirror fractured momentarily, splintered the group of four that was seated behind him.

Coalition infantry. Still, after thirty years, entertaining themselves with tales of the most hated turncoat in the Coalition's history.

Harlock pushed his glass down the bar, raised his finger for a refill. The barkeep obliged woodenly, splashing whisky onto the countertop before any of it made it into the empty glass. Harlock watched as the man dipped a finger into the spreading puddle and raised it to his mouth, smacking his lips loudly as he slid the drink back down the counter-top. Harlock's fingers closed reflexively around the glass, but left it firmly anchored to the bar as his gaze moved once more to the mirror and the reflection of the infantrymen scattered amongst the racks and rails of alcohol from a hundred named and unnamed planets. For moment he slipped in time, found himself back in the stiff uniform of the Coalition with the smell of burning flesh charring into his nostrils. And then he was back in the present, in his worn-out leathers, in a dirty off-world bar with his name being dragged by strangers once more through the mud.

The infantrymen behind him reached the end of the story. 'The entire fleet was destroyed,' the narrator said in awe-inspired tones, as if such a thing could not be possible. Another voice added, sadly, 'all hands lost,' and Harlock watched as the four faces in the mirror fell in sympathetic unison. The scarred remains of his right eye twitched beneath the patch that covered it, his fingers clenching tight around the heavy base of the glass as the infantrymen raised their drinks to men they had never known – men that Harlock had known, and known many of them better than brothers. His breath stopped in his lungs as he tamped down the urge to hurl the glass at the mirror and shatter the mocking faces into a million unsalvageable fragments. Instead he raised the whisky to his lips, downed the burning liquid in one quick swallow and slammed the glass back hard onto the counter. The noise ricocheted like a gunshot around the bar, felling the infantrymen into silence as he swivelled on his stool and turned a challenging eye upon them.

'I heard,' he said as he met each face in turn, 'that the Coalition fleet was not the only thing that Harlock destroyed that day.'

The infantrymen stared at him dazedly, like sleepers roused to waking from a dream.

Harlock looked at them, raked his gaze across the uncomprehending expressions on their faces. He was nothing to them. Unrecognised. Just a grifter in scuffed leather. As far as the universe was concerned, the Harlock of the Homecoming War was gone, martyred to the Coalition's cause and disappeared into darkness and legend.

He slid from the stool and scattered a handful of credits across the countertop. 'I heard,' he said again, 'that the Homecoming War ended only when Harlock destroyed the Earth.'

'What?' The infantrymen reacted as one, protesting violently, defending the grail of the sanctified Earth.

Harlock adjusted the pistol on his belt as the wave of disbelief and indignation rolled over him. It was the same everywhere he went. However the Gaia Coalition had done it, they'd hidden the destruction of the Earth from the entire universe.

Harlock's boots sounded loudly on the metalwork of the gantry, bounced in muted echoes through the dark spaces of the Arcadia's bridge. He wasn't sure why he always headed here first, except, perhaps, an unconscious homage to the remains of the captain he once was, reporting dutifully to his non-existent crew.

He skirted the dark matter generator, the mighty engine dormant now, yet alive still and pulling at him with invisible tendrils. Miimé had explained it to him, once, that it was a kind of static. Like attracting like. The engine responding to the dark matter that moved in his blood. He shuddered as a thousand fingernails scraped along his skin and worked their way into his flesh, the veins in his throat twitching and jumping, and he wondered if he let loose all his blood if he would finally be free. It was the briefest of thoughts, but he found his hands moving of their own accord, a thumb passing across the skin of his wrist. He looked down at the sliver of pale flesh exposed between glove and sleeve, the veins pulsing blue beneath the skin.

'You found it?' Her voice came out of nowhere. And everywhere.

Harlock lowered his hands, looked down at Miimé draped in cool lines across the captain's chair. He wasn't surprised to find her here, close to the dark matter that sustained her.

'Coordinates 95-97-63,' he said, because she was navigator now. And engineer. And tied implacably to him by the curious force that coursed through their bodies.

She studied him for a long moment, made him bow his head to stare at the seams in the floor. Thirty years of searching, and still less than half the Nodes had been discovered.

'And…' she said at last, when the silence threatened to break him, '…you found something else.'

Harlock bit down on the inside of his lip. Tasted blood.

'Gaia,' he spat. But if the word made any impact it was hidden by the smoothness of her face and the unblinking orbs of her eyes. 'This far out in the territories,' he continued, as if that alone were enough to explain the bitterness in his voice.

'No.' She raised a pale hand, as if to pluck the truth from the air.

His head snapped up and he met her gaze. What did she want him to say? That his past had caught up with him in that stinking bar? That for a moment, for just one moment, he wanted to cut the throats of four stupid men because that was the only way to silence them and stop them talking about him, reminding him, telling everyone on that tiny flea-bitten planet about him?

She smirked, and for a moment he wanted to slit her throat, too, because thirty years was already enough.

'What did they say?' she asked, the smirk still on her lips, and he wondered why he bothered ever to talk at all. It was easier to let her curl herself against him and take his thoughts directly out of his skull.

She reached out long fingers and peeled the glove from his unmoving hand, twined the coolness of her skin into the warm cradle of his palm, made the blood move inside him and rush screaming into his brain.

Time slipped, and he smelt again the odour of burning flesh.

'Mimé,' he said. Whispered. But it was too late.

It had taken hours…days?...before he'd realised the burning flesh was his own. Before he connected the pain in his face with the stench that constantly filled his world. It was his first true moment of consciousness. The first awareness of reality. And the horror of it made him want to scream.

Maybe he did scream. He remembered reaching for his damaged eye, feeling the bandage thick with damp and the wound hot behind it, and his fingers, trembling, as they recoiled from the heat and the blood and fell back to twist into the covers of the bed. And when at last his mind moved from that first realisation, that first panic, he found that other parts of him also burned with pain, and an overwhelming ache that reached deep into his bones.

It would have been easier to lie there, but his crew was dead (don't think about it), and Tochiro was dead (please don't think about it) and he needed, at least, to know if his own death was approaching. So he ground his teeth against his pain, heaved himself to sitting, swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stared down at the streaks of blood that stained the floor.

To live or to die. From that moment it was all up to him.

Harlock hauled himself, swaying, to his feet.

'Miimé.' His voice grated out of him. Alien to his ears. Painful in this throat.

She turned, looked at him, her gaze encompassing the entirety of him. If she was surprised to see him on the bridge, to see him walking, to see him alive, there was no sign of it on her smooth, pale face. She turned back to the generator. It was bleeding dark matter, still, in thin electric tendrils.

He limped past her in silence, his jaw tight against the shrapnel hobbling his leg, a legacy of the explosion that had torn out his eye. The Coalition had been aiming to kill, and Tochiro had been among the first to fall.

Tochiro…

He moved past Tochiro's console, avoided the blood that still darkened the floor, and collapsed into the captain's chair.

Tochiro… dead. His crew… all dead.

He'd destroyed them all in his rage. In his misguided honour. Because of his uncompromising vow to keep the Earth free.

The Earth…

Harlock stared through the forward viewport. There were clouds outside the ship. Darkness that seethed and boiled and was split by lightning the colour of blood. The sound of thunder echoed through the Deathshadow's superstructure, vibrated through his feet, made his heart stop in his chest.

Why couldn't he see the Earth?

His fingers moved, gripped tight to the arms of the chair as he pushed himself upwards and shuffled step by weary step to stand at the helm. The ship's wheel had been Deathshadow's one concession to tradition. An archaic relic of humanity welded firmly to the Nibelung's alien technology. Harlock's fingers drifted across the carved surface, caught on the knots and grains that etched the surface of the wood, the real wood, the only true thing of Earth that had been aboard the ship to remind them of what they had been fighting for.

Outside the port the clouds were pierced with sudden lightning.

'Miimé.' Harlock turned his head, watched as her fingers plucked dark matter out of the air. Thunder sounded, thick and deep and resonating in his skull.

'The Earth?' he asked.

There was no pause. No intake of air. No warning.

'Destroyed,' she said, with her flat, alien tongue.

Harlock's fingers tightened on the wheel, to prevent himself from falling.

'The ship?' he asked, with his voice caught dry in his throat.

Miimé's fingers paused in their movement, the unblinking eyes turning to look at him. Harlock thought he saw signs of pain in her pale face. How long had she been like this? How many days had she spent working the dark matter to no purpose?

'The ship,' she murmured, contemplating, and turned back to her work as the superstructure moved around them. And then she spoke, without turning to look at him. 'Deathshadow is dying.'

He bowed his head, stared at the deck that groaned beneath his feet. He'd known it. Could feel it. Could feel the ship warping and bending around them as the dark matter consumed them, pressed down on them with the weight of all the universe.

Lightning pierced the gloom, limned his world in red.

Miimé's voice drifted on the air, emerged clear out of the thunder. 'You are dying.'

His lips tightened, and he felt relief course through him. It was better that way. Better that he die, in his futility and his failure.

Her fingers paused in their movement and she turned, again, to look at him. 'But something new is being born.'

Harlock felt himself unravelling. As though he had become unstuck in Time and unstuck in Space. As though the atoms of his body were shifting. Moving. Rearranging, his Coalition uniform pulling tight across his body, strangling his movement and choking him at the throat. He stripped himself of the constriction and dropped the tunic to the floor, stood in the dimness of his quarters and surveyed the wounds to his shoulder, to his thigh, inspected the skin that had knitted with inexplicable speed over recently broken flesh. He passed a thumb across the new scars, scraped the old blood flaking to the floor.

The sound of thunder echoed through the Deathshadow's superstructure, vibrated through his body, made his heart stop in his chest.

The thunder reminded him of Earth. Of vid he had seen. The propaganda that Gaia broadcast to the outworlds to give humanity hope. Harlock had been to Earth himself once, just once, when accepting his commission. When the command of the Dark Matter Fleet had been bestowed on him with the ceremony that only a visit to Gaia Command could provide.

He'd felt alien in those first moments on the landing field, with the true Earthers looking at him the same way one looks at a rat crawling under the door, even though he was their conscript and their salvation both. He'd ignored the looks, the faintly curling lips, returned the cold crisp salutes with one eye on their upturned hands and the other on a butterfly that fluttered delicately across the tarmac. The Earth, this Earth… it was overwhelming. The colours of a living world assaulting eyes that had never known such riches before, had known only the dull red burn of a dull red planet. He found himself captivated by the sky, by the sun, by the flowers that bloomed in the shrubbery that lined the boulevard of Gaia Command. His mother had always wanted flowers, but the seeds had never taken. And later, years later, when she'd given up on flowers and Time had added the dust of her bones to the dust that blew unceasing across the planet, he'd left the bare world of home and enlisted with the Gaia Coalition, because it took him out of the dirt and gave him purpose. And money. And God yes, there were even women to be had in exchange for a handful of credits. Or, if he was very lucky, for just the gold trim of his uniform and the charming smile on his face.

Harlock moved to the bathroom annexed off his quarters, his captain's privilege, his own private facilities and his own running water. He loosened the bandage on his eye and leant forward as it fell damp into his hands. The wound still smelled burned, like charcoaled meat, and he glanced up at the mirror, the cloth falling from his hands as he surveyed the new landscape of his face. He bent abruptly to the small sink, unwilling to look any longer, and bathed his face in cool water.

There would be no charming of women now.

The thought hit him, a physical blow to the solar plexus that bent him at the knees, made him sag towards the floor with the air rushing out of him in great heaving gasps.

The women… the children of Earth… all dead… all dead…

He woke, curled uncomfortable with Miimé pressed close against his back, one pale arm draped across him and her breath cool against the nape of his neck. He wondered when she had come here. When she had climbed into his bed and lay herself down beside him.

((Harlock))

He raised a hand to his face, stared at the lines that etched his palm. Hoped if he ignored it the voice would go away.

((Harlock))

It was nothing. A figment. A voice conjured out of his guilt and his grief.

'Miimé,' he said, and she stirred, slid her hand along his arm. 'How long have we been here?'

'Here?' Her fingers rested at his bicep.

'In the dark matter.'

She was silent, considering.

'Minutes…' she said. 'Years…' He felt her body move against his in the faintest of shrugs. 'Dark matter has no Time. It comes from outside…' Her voice faded away, and he knew she was struggling with the words, with the alien sound of the human tongue. 'Outside.' Her hand moved away from his arm, fluttered lightly in the air.

Harlock lay silent, listened to the heartbeat of the ship pulsing around him. 'You mean outside of three-dimensional space?'

'It comes from the beginning.'

He slid from the bed. He didn't understand her. He never really had.

'Miimé,' he said as he dressed slowly. 'I hear Tochiro's voice.'

She moved from the bed and came to stand beside him as he turned to look at her.

'Tochiro calls my name. How is that possible? How – '

She passed a finger across his mouth to silence his words.

He brushed her hand away, the question bright in the amber of his good eye. 'How is that possible?'

'Harlock.' She pressed close, stole his fear right out of his head. 'The only ghost on this ship is you.'

((Harlock))

The word echoed around the room, called out to him from the other side of death, and he saw in her eyes that she had heard it too.

'Miimé.' He pulled away from her. 'What aren't you telling me?'

This thing wasn't built by human hands.

It was monstrous. A towering conglomeration of pipes and conduits that snaked outward from a central core, connexions that forced themselves through bulkheads and service points and away into the furthest reaches of the ship.

This was not Deathshadow's central computer. This was something else. An ancient Nibelung construct conjured by Miimé out of a dark explosion of matter.

Harlock moved towards it, craned his neck to see it tower away into the hollow carved out of Deathshadow's upper decks. He placed a hand upon it, walked in circles around it with the questions running in circles inside his head. The machine pulsed with life beneath his fingertips and he knew, he knew with absolute certainty that Tochiro was buried inside it. He could feel movement beneath the smooth dark metal. Could sense the calm essence of his friend curling and coiling and keeping watch over the ship. And over him.

Harlock turned to Miimé, equal measures of incredulity and dismay tainting his voice. 'How?'

She shrugged at him. Raised her eyes towards the dark towering hulk of the computer. 'Because of this,' she said, with the most emotion he had heard in her voice, 'Tochiro will live forever.'

Harlock rested his hand against the computer, felt the heartbeat ticking slowly within.

'Miimé.' He lowered his hand, turned to look at the cool, quiet beauty of her. 'What have you done?'

She stared at him, eyes large in her pale face, as though she didn't understand his words, or his tone, or the anguish that slowly twisted his face.

'It's what Tochiro wanted,' she said at last, as though Harlock should have known that, already.

'What have you done?' Harlock lunged at her, wrapped his hands around her slender throat. Because how could she have done this? To Tochiro? To him?

He felt the shift in her being as he squeezed, his fingers closing futile around an empty explosion of light. He staggered back, fell blind to the floor as she flowed in bright rivers around him, coalesced, returned to solid form.

'Harlock…'

He turned away from her, not wanting to see the incrimination in her eyes, and his voice was small, burned to gravel by his rage. 'What have you done?'

'This is what we did.' She knelt beside him, cupped his cheek in her hand, and for the first time ever he heard anger in her voice. 'Together.'

He slumped, weary, against the central computer, stared up at Miimé where she curled on the conduit overhead. Poised warily out of his reach, like a cat waiting for the rat to come out of its hole.

'Tell me about the dark matter,' he said, because it was inside him too. He could taste it on his tongue. Could feel it bleeding from the pores of his skin. It was burning him. Changing him. Making something out of nothing.

She slid down from the conduit, landed on soundless feet.

'Tell me how this…' he slammed the back of his head against the central computer, looked up to find her standing, staring at the walls around them '…is possible.'

She ignored his anger, the flush of pain that passed across his face. 'Dark matter is the seed,' she said, 'the first life.' She opened her hands, created a universe out of shards of light. 'It is the Creator.'

Harlock watched, mesmerised, as galaxies wheeled in the palms of her hands, formed and coalesced and were reduced back into darkness.

'It comes from the beginning. From beyond Time. It is Nothing,' she said, made him frown in the dim light, 'and Everything.' Black cloud now roiled in her grasp, and she moulded it, shaped it, released it dissipating through the room. 'It is the most dangerous force in the universe. With the power to create,' she looked at her empty hands, 'or destroy.'

Harlock slid unexpected into the yawning void of memory, his body tensing with the recollection of Deathshadow's engine exploding into arcs of purple static. He remembered the moment of contact, the moment the dark matter passed across him, passed through him, crackling and burning and setting his skin on fire. He'd smelled it, the tang of ozone as the darkness pressed against him, pressed into him, filled his mouth and his lungs and his vision with a thick, choking blackness.

'Miimé.'

The pale eyes slid languidly in his direction.

'Did you know what the dark matter would do?'

Her head fell, gossamer hair shrouding her face from his view. 'I should have stopped you,' she said, and her voice was small, the barest of whispers.

Harlock rose, placed his hands upon her shoulders. 'Did the Coalition know the Nibelung wielded such power?' His fingers clenched, dug deep into her yielding flesh. 'Did they know?'

She twisted, tried to pull away from his grip. But he held her firm, his eye hard and narrow and the horror building again inside him. Because he had been the commander of the fleet and he hadn't known.

Nobody had told him.

When the idea came it was unexpected, floating out of the dark on dim electronic whisperings so that Harlock questioned himself. And his sanity.

((Arcadia))

The word woke him. Pulled him unwilling from his refuge of slumber.

Arcadia…a story from his father, told to him one night when the moon burned red in the orange sky and the wind threw grit against the walls of the house. The memory of that night, that last moon-bright night, was the memory that Harlock carried closest to his heart. His father's voice, the untidy tangle of his father's hair, the weathered lines around the dark of his eyes. The dusky scent of him as he leaned across the bed and tucked the blanket around Harlock's chin so tight that the boy struggled to break free of the cocoon his father had wrapped him in, reached for him, twisted his fingers into the rough sleeve of his father's coat to keep him here, because tonight he was leaving and nobody knew when he'd come home.

((Listen))

Tochiro's voice came out of the dark again, a hypnotic reminder of the things they had talked about during the long cold nights, back when they both had been made of flesh and blood. The idea of a perfect place. A perfect world they would one day find. And now Tochiro was telling him they had a perfect ship. Something new and beautiful that had been born out of utter darkness, that would stand for freedom and peace.

((Our Arcadia))

Harlock rose, stood, listened to the faint creaks of Deathshadow as she neared the end of her transformation. 'Old friend…' he said, and a smile ghosted across his lips.

Miimé had been right. Something new was being born.

Arcadia.

He'd found the wine unexpectedly, a survivor of the Coalition attack. Contraband stowed in the crew quarters and dislodged from its hiding place during the bombardment. Or expelled by Deathshadow herself as she transformed… a glistening pustule, a glob of poison she didn't want embedded into her skin. Harlock had found it during an inventory of what was dead and what was left. Although what was the difference, he pondered as he raised the bottle towards the light, since what was left was dead.

He slid into the chair behind his desk, breathed a silent word to the wine's original owner as he poured it into a pair of cracked glasses, the deep crimson of it reminiscent of blood. He raised a glass to his lips, inhaled deep of the aroma, pushed the second glass towards Miimé.

'Tell me about dark matter,' he asked, after the wine had soured a path down his throat. 'And Time.'

Miimé's fingers closed around the glass, held it in place, firm against the table top.

'Could we use dark matter to change Time?' he asked when she didn't answer. He stared at her fingers splayed across the glass, pale against the wine. He swallowed again, felt velvet brush across his tongue. 'Could we use it to change the future? Or…' His words were grasping, forming around an idea that had taken root in his head. 'The past?'

A stream of electronic chatter filled the room, an idea so outrageous that Harlock's eye narrowed with sudden determination.

'Tochiro has a plan,' he said when the chatter ceased, was gratified when Miimé's gaze lifted to find his own. 'The Nodes of Time…' He lapsed into silence, considering. 'He says if we can find them, we can reset them.' His voice rose in sudden hope. 'We can reset Time.'

'Harlock – ' she said, and her fingers tightened around the glass.

'We could do it over,' he continued, leaning forward to look at her. To really look at her. 'And this time I won't make the same mistakes. I'll save the Earth instead of – ' He closed his mouth, leaned back in his chair. Watched the light splinter in her eyes.

'It's time to break free,' he said at last. 'Do we have enough power to escape gravity?'

Miimé lifted the glass from the desk, stared into its blood-red heart. ''We have all the power in the universe… but we have nowhere to go.'

'There are the Nodes to find.'

She shrugged. 'It will take years. A thousand, perhaps.' She tilted her head back, looked at him through slitted eyes. 'Or more. The universe is endless. It will move and change, but you and I will remain.'

'Because of the dark matter.' An exhalation escaped him, the softest of sighs as he raised the glass to his lips and turned away from the enigma of her. From the realisation that he hated her. And loved her.

'We're going to need a crew,' he said into the wine.

'Time enough for that,' she said, and he watched from the corner of his eye as she lifted the glass to her pale, indifferent lips.

She was right. They had an eternity of Time, but Harlock couldn't help but feel that it was already running out. He drained his glass, savouring the aftertaste as he reached again for the bottle. 'And we're going to need more wine.'