xenosaga episode I. chaos & cherenkov. spoilers through the cathedral ship. PG. characters belong to NAMCO and monolith soft.
everloving
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The Elsa drifts, steadily steered by autopilot during what passes for nighttime onboard. Silence settles throughout the ship while its occupants sleep, the quiet interrupted only by faint whirrings and beepings of normal function.
Cherenkov's footsteps are awkward and heavy as he stumbles towards the vending machines. Nightmares keep him awake, pain pervades his body, and his damned arm won't stop trembling -- not even long enough to press a button. He trips backward, dizzy and disoriented, shoulders slamming into the short wall as he sinks to the floor.
Everything hurts; his vision is bleary at best. The sedative slips from his shaking hand and clinks out of reach, and he doesn't have the strength to lean towards it. Light laced with searing pain flashes across his sight, his chest feels tight, paralyzed, and his arm, it's wavering--
Someone offers him a drink, but it tastes sour in his mouth, like vinegar on his tongue. He's coughing, he's choking, he can't defend himself, he can't breathe in--
A cool thumb slides cool water across his burning forehead, and chaos whispers something soothing under his breath. It's not English, he's almost sure of this, but the effect is not lost: he listens.
He listens when fingertips stray through his hair to his temples and stay there; he listens when gentle palms rest on his shoulders; he listens when chaos takes his hands in his. He breathes, and listens, and thinks that maybe it was English all along.
Closing his eyes helps him shut out the world, and while chaos is holding him, it's as if the rest of the world really is gone: he's alone but not, the pain overriden by a sense of peace, soft-spoken sentences filtering through in phrases --
"...tired, wounded soul..." "...light of tranquility..." "...freedom from suffering..."
-- and he feels calm, feels safe, feels but does not see a sense of blue everywhere around him. All is still, and he is still breathing, and when chaos says "let it go," he hears it in his mind and knows he can rest again. He thinks a "thank you," and dreams of nothingness.
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He wakes on his bed with the retrieved needle nearby, and needs nothing more than to find that solace and solitude again.
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"I like it here. I'm the only living thing that exists in this place. There's nothing else. It feels good. This is exactly what I've been searching for all this time."
No anger, no sadness, no happiness, not even a future. The only thing that's here is me,
and that'll eventually fade away…