He felt her fingers work on his shoulder. Slow and steady, rhythmic weaving of stitches across the lucky swipe from a less lucky Merc. In, across, out. In, across, out. Quick, light and the needling pain was almost sweetlike.
He was lying back in the pilot seat, rotated round to face the inside of the ship he had just acquired from that con of a planet. It was cold and dark, and just how he liked it.
The stitching continued, continuing to close the wound that lay from the shoulder over his arm towards his elbow. She sat next to him, working on his wound in silence but he could feel her focus, feel that grin that was entirely her. A smile that had followed him since he had dragged her from the dark monster planet that he pulled her and the holy man from. A smile that had followed him around calling out from shadows and dreams ever since.
His eyes were closed and inhaled deeply. Imagining her scent. As a kid it had been that youthful combination of anxious, worry, keenness, blood, change. As the woman, who he had saved again, saved by pulling her out of a dark pit into the burning light, she had smelled of life, sweat, anger and fury. She was glorious. That fight with the necros on crematoria's surface when he had felt her body in his hands, muscle, bone - a weapon in human form. She had been an animal all of her own. An animal that had his howling out for her.
Pause in the stitching. A light snip and a thread was cut.
He kept his eyes closed, tightly, the pain growing. Sleep was fading. It was rare that he experienced this feeling, this emotion curling tightly in his chest.
"You're not real."
He felt a breath respond to his statement down the side of his neck. A breath that could not be but he felt it.
"I watch you die."
And he had. She had been glorious again. In a moment that he could barely describe to himself. Had felt as if his very existence had been tearing out of him. As if his skin was being cleaved from his body and tendons pulled to snapping point. Yet, she had saved him. Saved him with a spear to the necro's back. But she had been thrown backwards, back onto a blade on the wall and had then bled out in his arms.
He had come for her, come for her as soon as he knew she was lost in the dark again and not where he had left her, where he had told her to stay, with the holy man, with civilization, in the light. And now she was lost again, somewhere he couldn't save her this time. The kid, the woman gone.
And it pissed him off.
It angered him that she haunted him. He had left her safe. She had thrown everything he had given her away and signed with mercs, the same weak fuckers that had suggested using her as bait, the same crazy fuckers that had hung her by the neck to see him work for their amusement. Then she had to go and die. Died in his arms.
"Are they mutually exclusive, being dead and being real." Fabricated replies from a ghost.
The wound was stitched and he ran his finger over it. Kid stitched well. Always had done. She had stitched him first night off that monster planet. She had crawled over to him, half passed out in the pilot chair and had cautiously leaned towards him. He had grabbed her hand before she had touched her intended mark. A long talon carve across his arm. Down from the shoulder towards the elbow. Deep enough to bleed but nothing to cause any concern. She had had wide eyes, been so keen to be of use to him, wanted desperately to give him something. So he indulged those bright keen eyes and keen little fingers and let her stitch him. Like now. Except she was dead and this wasn't real.
No matter how truly desperately he wanted it to be. Desperation was not a feeling he experienced. Couldn't recall that last time he had craved anything. But she was his craving, craved that she was here, with him, alive.
He'd been here before, with her. On the edge of his dreams. Feeling, smelling, hearing her heartbeat faintly on the edge of sleep ending. Knowing when he awoke fully she would be gone. Close enough to grasp and then for her to pass through his hands. He felt his hands form fists by his side. Thought he could hear her whisper something into his ear. Could feel her hot breath.
His eyes snapped open, turned his head towards her and was met with the darkness of his ship.
The anger grew, rose out of him and he roared into the dark. That tearing sensation within him releasing into the black. That bitter, gnawing guttural sensation that had not shifted since he watched those green/grey eyes turn cold. Leaving him raw and burning.
And then it settled again, back to the cold, steel, silver glinted fury that he knew, cultivated and crafted into a weapon all of its own. In the dark, in the cold, just where he wanted to be.
Where he wanted her to be, with him.
Where she would have gladly followed him once upon a time, wide green eyes chasing him down into the dark. But now she was dead. And there was no changing that.
He ran his uncurled fingers across the would be wound . An old scar that had once had small hands work on. And now a ghost replayed those actions in the form of the kid grown up. A ghost that haunted him. She sometimes was there when he slept. Fighting by his side on crematoria, watching him on a skiff crossing the black, holding the back of his shirt as he turned to leave the holy man's home.
But the holy man was dead, the kid grown up was dead. And he was on the Merc ship, in the dark, and the cold, spinning in space above yet another planet writhing with monsters that he had pulled a Merc from. And not any Merc, fucking daddy John's.
He could almost hear the holy man laugh at his irony. But it was silent, just his coarse breath exhaling into white fumes in front of him. Where his ghost had been.
He stretched out his hand into the dark where she had been and turned it in the dark before closing it into a fist.
He felt restless. You'd think carving up those mercs, spooking old man Johns and crawling out of the reach of more raptor talons would have given the animal in him something to gnaw on but he felt unsatisfied.
He turned the pilot seat back towards the navigator panel, pulling up the star maps on the screen, rolling the planets across his fingers over the screen. He felt her hands ghost his shoulders. Small hands morphing into the woman's. He rotated worlds beneath his fingers before settling on one.
He mused about cryo. The needle rested to his right with the arm pack by the side. Never been fussed by cryo, never worked for him before, would fall asleep but wake regardless of it, but it did keep him down a little longer than sleep alone and he was starting to feel that anger grown again. Those soft hands, lingering a breadth from him, out of reach from his own, and he knew if he turned to face her, it would just be the black staring back. And the lack of flesh, texture, something to grab was making him itch and he felt that restlessness crawl underneath his skin.
He leaned forward and unsheathed the cryo needle and slowly inserted it into his vein.
The nauseating chemical ran through his body and the opiate-like haze flooded his senses. Dulling his smell and turned the black ship scenery into a closing tunnel of grey.
And there she was, bright green eyes staring down into his. She smiled down at him and he reached out to her before cryo pulled him under. To the murky underworlds of his subconscious.