Ashes. Ashes and soot. Ashes and soot and accusations. That was all that remained. The burnt taste lingered on the air, singed wiring...and flesh. The flesh had burned too. The wrenching yawn of metal as it tore loose from its moorings echoed faintly through the empty corridors. A charnel house, all empty but for her, and the unheard screams that continued on forever somewhere just above or just below register. She'd heard the screams, felt them resonate through her while the flames licked and bit away at the affected tiers: Pilot's screams, her own, the screams that ran along below her skin and never ever stopped. The fire was gone: but the ship burned still. Loose debris wafted on the thinned-out air. She breathed deep to let it fill her lungs, choke her; she remained absolutely still to let it settle on her skin, block out stomata and photoreceptors...
Someone grabbed her arm, and she whirled into him, blinking eyes grown accustomed to the dark of her lids, the dark after the blaze. "Stark! You—"
He cut her off. "You're walking around with it, aren't you?" he demanded in a half-whisper, still holding her captive, butted up against him. "Hm?" He went on, not giving her the chance to lie, "I see it in your face. Makes you...edgy. Footsteps irregular. You're hurting."
She only looked at him, above reproach.
"You don't have to, you know." he admonished sadly, the eye beside his mask drawn down at the outer corner in the way she found so endearing.
"Yes, I do." It was not an acquittal, it was a statement of fact.
"Aren't I hurt enough for the both of us?" he challenged suddenly, his one eye trying to pin her down as he cocked his shorn head with a bird's craning motion, trying to make sense of a two-dimensional perception.
"Stark, you don't understand." she tried. "I did this to her...all this pain, my own doing. This is my fault; the consequences of it belong to me."
He reeled away from her, laughing. The fingers of his free hand articulated like the legs of a panicked spider above his narrow palm, as if he half-wanted to take her by the face, slap the sense into her that was so plain to him. "If you hadn't, Moya would most certainly be dead right now." he insisted with the inescapable logic she'd been trying without success to impress upon herself ever since that horrible choice had presented itself. "Burnt is better than eaten in tiny, tiny bits, eaten all gone in tiny little bits."
"Now, she'll only die more slowly." The fatalistic words were as bitter in her mouth as the metallic ash all around her.
"That's life, though, isn't it?" Stark riddled. "Give and take, and give and take, and take and take and take and take..." Abruptly he was sane again, pressing himself close to her so that she stared a bare inch into a drowning orb the purest blue-green of the clear, estival shallows of the Elir ocean of her youth, and the bronzed plane of metal. "Let it go, Zhann." He brushed ash from her cheek, from the naked crest of her head, from the sensitive skin on the backs of her hands. "It's not helping Moya."
"No." The little slice of pain she could carve away and pull into herself was pitiably small next to the overwhelming expanse of burnt biomechanoid tissue. Next to the immeasurable pain the great Leviathan bore, whatever she could take would be woefully inadequate. She could not even be sure Moya noticed the contribution. "No," she agreed, "but it does make me feel better."
The Stykera could be inordinately stubborn. He stared at her unrelentingly, unconvinced, until she buckled and began to let the borrowed discomfort slide away. Satisfied, he put his arm more firmly around her, fingers tapping spasmodically against her shoulder, bobbing his head triumphantly as he dragged her along. She allowed him to lead her away, knowing she would be back as soon as he wasn't looking, to wander the scorched and cauterized passageways. She let the pain slide away, too, like grains of sand between her limp fingers, dwindling away til it was was nearly gone. She kept it at that, a vestigial amount that Stark would not catch. Just enough so that it was impossible to sleep or to breathe easy. Just enough so that there could be no danger of her forgetting, or feeling alone in her shame and grief. Just enough to dull the edge of her ravenous guilt.