Disclaimer: Nope, still nothing! All theirs, not mine.
The anger I felt for Gunn was misdirected; I acknowledge that now. It was really anger I felt for myself, except somehow, in my anguish, the scalpel missed my own gut and found his instead.
I cannot hold events as purely his fault; I didn't from the moment I left him on the ground. He didn't know, anymore than I had. It wasn't his role to know – all his knowledge was fake and applied. I was the one who should have seen what would happen! Me.
That was my role, and I failed.
Stabbing a man is a strange experience. Of course, when it happened, I had no recollection of my previous histories, yet it felt familiar and oddly…right.
A man is fleshly, he is merely a weight of soft, permeable mass hung around a jokingly fragile skeleton. The scalpel had sunk it as if returning to the womb. The cold metal had become warm, warmer than the heat of my hand, because all my being had shrivelled into a cold, hard creature who was afraid of the light.
His eyes and his reaction said shock, but they whispered understanding, and I dug it in that much deeper, seeking peace for us both –
Gunn's pain hadn't even come close to my own, and I felt little satisfaction from the act. After all, no man truly enjoys hurting another because they know it is futile. It cannot undo the previous transgression. Stabbing Gunn did not bring Fred back, as I had known it wouldn't. I was simply following millennia of instinct.
The Astronaut only wins if he takes off his suit.
Knox knew that, I believe.
For him, I felt little anger. Knox was different, because I understood him. My feelings for him were all rooted in fear.
He was someone who I could have been. He saw in Fred the same things I saw and expressed it in the only way he knew how, in the way the Romans had expressed their love for their Emperors. He deified her. Truly, what more fitting way to worship the one you love than to make her a God?
Fred-Illyria. Illyria-Fred. Worshipped in the heavens, the light of all things.
My dear, beautiful Fred. I don't know why you couldn't stay