She stares at the stars. They are different to the ones she watched on Mindoir. There are fewer, duller, they don't seem to have that comforting twinkle she remembers as a child. Her father used to sit with her in the hammock that slung between two trees behind their house, his arms encircling her as she curled into his chest. He was always warm; a solid and tangible reminder that she was loved. When it was cold they would bring cushions and thermocycler blankets so they could stay there, way past her bedtime if they could get away with it. If her mother was distracted by something inside, they would sometimes stay out there for hours. They didn't say much. They didn't need to. He would point out the constellations. Ascaris, with its trailing tail of light that emerged from the nebula. Spirallae, twisting in a vortex around the red dwarf that always dominated the sky during the night. Entium that seemed to shoot outwards with a hundred thousand tiny rays from a single point, so far away. Well, it was far away now.
The ground is hard beneath her body, but the discomfort seems distant, as if it were not quite actually there. No sound breaches the oppressive silence, not a whisper of wind in the trees nor the ragged breaths that she can feel in her chest. The shockwave of the bomb had engulfed her, tossing her across the rooftop until she was falling, flailing limbs and wide eyes as windows rushed past in brief flashes. Then all the air was sucked from her lungs and she was slamming into the ground, her armour grinding along the surface as it tried and failed to stiffen and shield her from the impact. Time had passed, uncounted, unnoticed.
The sky is dark. Not completely, in the way of Earth, but a half-light from a deep ruby veil that throws shadows over everything until the world is a maze of dim shapes and blind corners that yawn ahead, daring you to step into the open. She turns her head, feeling the neck plates of her armour scrape together from the warping of repeated impacts. A fiery pain streaks down her spine, blinding her until all she can see is that scarlet sky, emblazoned on her eyelids as they squeeze shut to exclude the world.
Shapes swim into focus as she blinks, eyes stinging with the sweat that is still trickling down her forehead. She's losing too much moisture. There are only a few sips left in the pack tucked into the hollow of her armour, and no food to speak of. The fight has taken too much from her.
She can see the distant flashes from the fight, now moving away from her sprawled body until even they peter out and die. There is no one to look for her. She left without a word, without a plan, without back up. Thrown herself into a fight that wasn't hers. The settlement needed help, it was true, but that only felt like half the reason she had taken this. There was no good reason to have gone alone. No justification to take such an extraordinary risk.
She wasn't afraid of death. It didn't haunt her as it had once done, a constant presence in her life that dealt blow after blow until she was spent, unable to carry on. Death was a jealous companion, selfish and greedy. He takes everyone in the end.
With an effort she shifts to face the stars again, the pinpricks of light that somehow seemed to flicker in and out of sight until she wasn't sure they were there at all. In the end, that's all she was. A failing light in a sea of others that couldn't hold on until it was swept away in the tide of night.
A deep, steadying breath. Her eyes closed.
She can't feel her legs.
So it's now a two-shot, thanks for reading. I was feeling a bit rubbish so I scribbled this down. How'd I do?
-AT