It was quiet like sleep, it was dark just like sleep, and it was unhinged just like sleep.
Stork knew that this was not just any kind of sleep. When he could not open his eyes, he knew something was wrong. When he could not talk, even when he tried to strangle the words out of his vocal chords, he knew that something was wrong. When his legs and arms yearned to move, even for just a little bit, but couldn't, he was then dead sure that something was wrong.
Everything was so wrong.
He was unable to wake up, talk, or move.
Yet…
He could hear, smell, and feel everything.
Where was he, he wondered almost frantically, his paranoia rising to the full extent even in this wordless hopeless place in which he did not remember how he came to be. Stork's sensitive ears heard the faint beeping of an unknown sort of machinery. Two needles were imbedded in his arms, and there were tubes up his nostrils, pumping oxygen into his lungs.
The unconscious Merb racked his brains to remember what happened before he came to this blackened world.
An…an attack.
That's right; the Condor was being blown to pieces. Talons everywhere, red shots fired in all directions. My fingers were gripping the helm like nothing else mattered. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I could see the destruction outside the panes of glass.
The pain in his head gave him the rest of the evidence to realize what had happened. He recalled being forced to the floor of the ship, hitting his head and knocking him out cold.
Just how hard, he wondered, did he hit the surface?
Outside of whatever kind of room he was in, he could hear voices. They were faint, but being the attentive scrutinizing person he was, he listened carefully. Though on the outside, he was sure he looked like a simple breathing corpse, and on the inside he nearly died right then and there from what he heard.
"What's going on?"
Aerrow's voice. That which was uncharacteristically quiet and grave.
Someone else spoke, and Stork didn't recognize it. He figured as much that he was a doctor, though. A very worried, sympathetic doctor.
"The trauma to his head was too great, and his cranial capillaries are broken, letting the flow drain over his brain. We tried to reconstruct them, but there are points that we couldn't find."
"Why don't you just tell me what the hell is going to happen."
"Even if we did fix the problem, he's in a coma and he'd never wake up anyway. He's going to die."
Then there was a pregnant silence. It was well known that whenever news like that was delivered, it was much like witnessing someone die first hand; slow, painful, unbearable. Like a sack of bricks in the face.
"I'm sorry, son."
There were swift footsteps that faded away in a few second's time.
Aerrow's breathing was shallow as he leaned against the wall right outside the room.
"Fuck…" He whispered, so low that Stork almost couldn't hear the obscenity.
Inside of his dark dungeon, awaiting his eternal doom that had finally caught him in the end, Stork was still reeling at the fact that soon he was to join millions of others in the land of the dead. It was slightly ironic. He had always pictured himself dying in the most painful way possible, whether it be from having his legs sawed off to having his throat slit to having tons of rocks slowly placed on top of his lower half until it crushed all of his vital organs.
The basis for his imaginative ideas of death was one thing: torture.
He sightlessly peered around his dark province, realizing quickly that this was not entirely painful or agonizing.
Physically.
If he could've cried, he would have. Because instead of endless amounts of pain clouding his thoughts and contemplations, he was alone with his emotions, dishing out thoughts that he found were just as distressing as anything else he cooked up in his insanely distrustful mind.
Bodily pain was what he had always obsessively feared. Emotionally…he was treading upon new territory.
Now he was being crushed by the weight of new fears. What would happen to his position, who will fill it, was the Condor nothing more, what would happen when he was gone, what would become of the Storm Hawks? How would his demise affect his friends?
The strangeness of it all was growing. Stork never intentionally referred to them as his friends. And realizing that made him feel yet another useless emotion: guilt.
Of course they were his friends, he reasoned. They risked their lives countless times for each other, never giving it a second thought. There was respect, there was laughter, there was love. It didn't have to be acknowledged, it was in the air and it never went away. Even the morose Stork knew that it was there.
Stork could still hear Aerrow outside of his hospital room, emitting quiet choked sobs that reeked of anger, betrayal, and sadness. He had never seen Aerrow cry before, never seen him break down no matter what sort of uncompromising crisis they were in. After every furrow of his auburn eyebrows came a smile. After every battle call there was a jovial holler of victory.
His leader was crying for him.
More footsteps, voices accompanying.
"Aerrow?"
Piper.
"He's…" Aerrow breathed in deeply, hastily wiping freshly gathered tears from the corner of his eyes.
"Spill it, dude!" Finn said, the humorously faux charisma completely absent in his voice.
"He's not going to make it." There was hopelessness in his captain's voice, and nothing but.
Another silence. This was even worse than the one between Aerrow and the doctor.
"You're-you're joking, right?" Junko said. He was never one to mask what he was feeling, and it was evident in his words.
"No. I'm not." Aerrow said firmly, but the curtness failed to register to anyone.
Piper abruptly broke into tears, covering her face with her hands and moaning something in coherent.
"I didn't think it was that bad…I didn't…" Finn kept saying over and over until he trailed off.
Their tears were quiet, but not out of the earshot of their half dead carrier pilot. Finally, Aerrow broke away and motioned for them to follow him into the room.
"C'mon. He doesn't have much time left."
Stork wished so desperately that he could sit up, wished that he could open his eyes and tell them that he was still here psychologically, and that he was not just a vegetable lying in a white clad bed with some futile bandages wrapped around his head. He could only imagine how he looked to them. He never held himself in quite high regard when it came to their team, but hearing Aerrow's anguish over the news of his imminent death convinced him that maybe they very well cared about him.
And maybe that was enough right now.
Suddenly he felt many hands on him. Normally he would discourage this kind of contact, fearing that he would suffer an intense allergic reaction to humans' skin or that he would catch some sort of germ, but the touch was surprisingly welcomed. Since his sight was gone, he would have to rely on his other senses to tell who was who.
There was a shift in the bed as Junko laid his head in his arms beside the dying Merb, the heaviness signaling him as to whom it was. Two pairs of small but thickened hands rested gently on his bandaged wrists, which were most likely Aerrow and Finn. Another hand rested further up on his upper arm, which was also rough but to a much lesser extent, fingerprints practically gripping his pallid green skin for dear life. Stork's poor heart leapt a painful second faster as Piper laid her head right over the weakening muscle, her tall gravity defying hair brushing against his cheek.
Don't waste your time, guys…
Stork thought, in attempt to be his usual guarded self, but knew that not only was it useless, it wasn't what he was truly feeling. All emotional and physical qualms aside, he felt whole. With his friends by his side during his last seconds, he felt whole. In this dark void that was life without sight, movement, or words, he felt whole.
However, now that he was there, nearly teetering over the edge between being a breathing carcass of a once active pilot and going towards whatever came after life itself, he found himself less accepting of his death every moment that passed, which was odd seeing as in a sticky situation he was always the first to assume they would all lose their lives.
This wasn't a selfish feeling that was holding him back from letting go. In fact, the more he thought about his friends gathered lovingly around him, the more his want to wake up and comfort them grew. His body was losing its energy slowly but surely, and even in this comatose world of darkness, things were becoming fuzzy.
It was becoming harder to breathe.
Each side pulled him in different directions. His squadron on one side, the afterlife on the other.
"Stork…"
Aerrow's voice had stemmed the internal battle that had formed inside of his damaged mind. Stork mentally froze at his tone, which held such sadness that it almost made him cry. And it pained him, for he couldn't.
"I don't know if you can hear me right now..."
Shit, if only he knew.
"…But I gotta say this. You are an amazing person, a strong and brilliant person."
It's so mushy, but I guess I can allow it this time.
"I don't have a clue what's going on up there in that paranoid head of yours, a-and I never did, but just know that you don't have to be afraid."
I can't help it, Aerrow. Even now I can't abandon my nature.
"I can't deny that we'd want nothing more than for you to wake up and everything would go back to normal…"
Stork could feel the wetness of tears staining his chest as Piper silently wept, her body trembling to keep silent. In fact everyone was trembling to keep their composure. Aerrow's voice shook, but it didn't stop.
"But if you're tired of fighting, you can let go. We will never stop loving you."
The inward quarrel stopped. Everything was calm as Stork took in his captain's words.
They love me.
I can let go.
Of everything. This room, with its beeping sounds, the bed with rough sheets, the bandages with a tinge of red from blood soaking through their white material, this black temporary world would all disappear in a flash.
Still…
He could imagine their faces. All of their normally exulent faces with voices equally as such. Now their visages were probably shining with tears, and their tenor torturously mournful.
But although Stork was still regretful about leaving them behind, but he felt his fears disperse quietly as if Aerrow's words were that of an angel's granting him freedom to walk without his eyes darting to every corner and hiding place, searching frenziedly for anything that would cause him harm.
The smell of salt from his friends' tears filled the room, and he begged his body to cry with them. He tried squeezing them from his closed tear ducts, and had finally relaxed in relief as he felt a single drop slide down slowly from the corner of his eye. He couldn't die and leave them with the thought that he couldn't hear a thing they were saying to him. The tear was his last communication, and he silently sighed in reprieve as a finger came up and gently brushed it away.
There was no more talking, no more quivering. Though the pain inside them was there to stay for years to come, they had helped set the Merb free of the world's dreadful fears. Stork's dim world began to melt away, like snow on a spring tree branch, and the ginger pull to the other side worked its magic. The liberty he unknowingly thirsted for was poured down his throat in earnest.
His heart thumped its last beat, and he slipped away, the line on the heart monitor to his far right going flat.