Blue eyes slid open, groggy, clouded. What.  Engine sounds...but…Spike left him a long time ago...

"Probably some stranger come to stare at the unfortunate, and therefore pity." He muttered, weakly. "I don't need pity. I need to die..."

A sleek shark rose through the ocean, the metallic nose of it just coming into Gren's darkening vision. But there were no sharks in space...  "No sharks, but there's wolves, that's for damn sure." He coughed, shoulders spasming even as more blood welled through the fingers crossing his lips.

The shark had a rider. Enclosed in the craft's cab was a head of moonlight hair, and a drained, seamed face. The eyes were wild with fear, which Gren had not expected. A lasso of wire coil caught some twisted crag of the musician's ship, and the jerk almost startled him to move.

"Junk collectors not even waiting for the owner to die first?"

Another jerk. He was being towed. Vicious' ship rode abreast of his, and as the silver-haired man's hands clamped the choke, his eyes never left the blood-streaked face. Gren gave him a careless smile, made macabre by the red lines at the corners of his mouth. Recognition danced just beyond his reach...it was...he was...the name burned away from his memory by the ghostly premonition of death.

"I thought that death brought all the answers." He muttered. "How very ironic."

-

Titan. After the blood. When life began again, after the killing stopped, there was a lull over the entire platoon. They had killed. Now, they were once again conscious of the blood on their hands, or splashed liberally over their clothes, as the desperation of survival trickled away. A few took up incoherent moans. Gren simply drew into himself, shutting out everyone and everything. It didn't matter. In an hour they'd be deployed again, and he could shove the horror and anger to a dark corner once more.  But every time he locked those feelings up, they mated, and their issue-guilt, self-pity, and helplessness-haunted him in their stead.

He hadn't always been alone. Sometimes Vicious came to sit with him. He asked to be called that...a nickname gathered in the aftermath of a trench war, when Vicious had nearly killed a fellow soldier who refused to fight. In slow motion, Gren watched the scene again, as a steely hand clamped around the troublesome comrade's throat and shoved him against the side of the trench. "Everyone with fingers to press a trigger will fight!" Vicious screamed, "You may think I'm vicious...but you don't know what vicious is! Vicious is those guerillas out there...they'll take your head off without flinching, and if you don't fight, they will!"

But when Vicious leaned against the trench wall beside Gren, despite the latter's attempts to put him off, the quiet presence was anything but his namesake. He spoke little, but he was almost always there.

You saved my life then...why did you damn me afterward?

Why did you bother? Were you keeping me safe...just for that?