The others told him he was one of the lucky ones. Every world the Galra came near met the same end, and by now, his had met it too. Planet eradicated, species gone, family dead. Like all of theirs. Alive on the ship, they were all the lucky ones.

But he didn't feel lucky, amid all those stories of shattered planets, the dust rising in space, and he hated himself for it. This was what Shiro had died for, for him to curl up sick and broken in an alien prison cell, and still he was impertinent enough to cry. He was a disappointment… but Shiro wasn't here to know that, Shiro wasn't ANYWHERE, nobody was anywhere anymore…

"Yes, we are the lucky ones…"

He'd never been religious, but he was starting to believe in Hell.

Not long ago, he would think about escape. Now he was thinking of it less and less. He couldn't really focus on ANYTHING anymore, his head throbbed constantly, his joints ached, the creatures in the cell said a lot of things but not one of them said it would all be okay.

So he spent a lot of time just worrying the cut with his finger. Sanitary, no. But it couldn't do any worse than the alien pathogens that had been on that blade… his immune system could never have been prepared for them, whatever they were. It wasn't healing well at all…

"Don't touch it, kid," another prisoner said, pulling his hand away. Someone else whispered snidely about the reason the Earth ones went extinct.

But how could they not understand? He had nothing else, not Katie, not his mother or his father, but here, right here, was the last proof in the universe that another human being had ever existed, had stood close to him once…

He used to think about escape. Now he was thinking about the crushing loneliness he was taking in with every breath, and whether it would last forever. He'd always expected to die and turn into nothing, it had never bothered him before, but now that he could quantify the last moment he would spend with another human being, and to think THAT was all there would ever be, slowly the thought unnerved him more and more.

He was starting to understand why man had built its gods the way it did. God was what you needed when you loved something, when you loved something and were faced with a void like this one. Ancient man was not so different from him, ancient man had wanted answers but had no means to get them, so it placed a god in front of the staring void and called it that. He never used to have patience for people who clung to those notions, not when humanity had the tools to look past those paper gods.

But his fever was getting worse and he was singing a spiritual. It was simple, it kept his breathing even, it was familiar, just a tad. He didn't know all of it. Seemed that whoever wrote it must have known a lot about suffering, though.

His cellmates looked on but kept their distance. Like he might turn and bite them at any moment. Then again… he wasn't really sure that wouldn't happen, not when the world was spinning and there was nothing to take hold of.

He closed his eyes and tried not to think about the pain.

"If you get there before I do…"

They all knew he was going to die. No one said it, but you could feel it in the way the air hung quiet, in the way one of them knelt over him, tapped him twice above each eye, murmuring alien syllables that must have been its home planet's last rites.

This was how the Earth would go extinct, its last breathing creature on a prison ship lightyears away, a speck of dust escaped, another curiosity in a menagerie of dying species. Matt Holt, the only human to see this hour, slung in the arms of a creature just as lost, they were two motes that never should have collided, and now he was being given a prayer that didn't belong to him, but who else did this creature have to give it to, was this the honor of Matt Holt, the last human, to go extinct together with this prayer.

And just like that, the notion of dying this lonely became unthinkable. He wished the alien knew a prayer from Earth. He wished HE knew a prayer from Earth.

There was a sound outside and the door slid open. The others all drew back. Something stepped in, the Galra soldier in charge of their block.

It pointed at him.

"Prisoner 117-9873."

He looked up in a daze. The creature next to him retreated to the wall.

"You're coming with me," the warden said, shackling his wrists and pulling him to his feet.

He took a step and fell.

The warden scoffed and picked him up. It was not a gentle thing. But it seemed to not want to break him.

"A 'noteworthy species' that can't even walk…" the warden muttered on the way out. "Not my fucking job…"

Matt was too tired to ask questions. He wasn't thinking of where the warden was bringing him. He was wondering where he would go when he died.