Updates may be slightly sporadic for the next couple weeks as I prepare to move across the country, but they should stabilize again once I'm settled in.

Also, after this chapter is about where you should stop reading if you want to pretend it has a happy ending. It doesn't. But if you want, you can pretend that it does.

Sometimes, Iscom really hated when he was right.

He woke up with the sudden desperation that comes at the end of a nightmare, but physically, only his eyelids moved. There was none of the spontaneous ricocheting off his pillow like a springboard that seemed to be such a staple in dramas. Instead, he lay silently, perfectly still, trying to recapture the horror he had just escaped so he at least knew what he was so terrified by.

Parts of the dream came back in an instant, those were his memories. The marshy Alderaanian coastland, the clear blue water, the reeds that grew right up into the water. Lindy's screaming, the Captain's horrified commands, the shot to his own arm. Padan's burned face—or what had been left of Fosa. Those things had happened. Less than a year had passed, but it seemed like so much longer…

The parts that were his subconscious's creation were harder to piece together. He remembered thinking that they were in a ship, somehow: it made no sense now, but at the time it seemed perfectly clear. That they were crashing over the coast, that was how the dream had started. The five of them in the ship… had there been six?

They hit the ground, somehow ending up in the exact same formation that they had been when the Imps attacked. Things had played out as his memory had instructed, until the fire-bomb went off. It took Padan and Fosa… and Emras. Badri. Why had he been there? His subconscious thought it would be hilarious to mix his teams, current and former?

Lindy had screamed as Padan fell on top of him, and Iscom had started to make his way over when he was shot. He felt the pain shoot through his arm, knowing that it was pointless to worry about it now while lives were at stake. The Captain shouted him over to Lindy, then shouted a query. Iscom responded positively, and the Captain went to meet her fate at the hands of the Imps. Not killed, not yet. But somewhere in the back of his mind, Iscom always wondered how long they would keep her on life support before they gave up. Even in his dream, he wondered.

He had made it to Lindy and Padan, clutching his arm all the way. Padan was, miraculously, still alive. The mess the fire-bomb had made of his body could be repaired, if they made it to help. Iscom did the best he could. Lindy held Padan steady, looking guilty for screaming earlier, before Iscom nodded him off to help the Captain. He would never know how many the Captain took down before Lindy arrived, or how many Lindy took after she fell, but the total added up to the number in the surprise attack.

Iscom turned around, intending to help, but his memory played yet another trick. The dream had replaced Fosa with Badri, exchanging one ruined body for another. Instead of the charred corpse, there was barely half a corpse. Burns covered his left side, but they were minimal in comparison. He was bleeding steadily from the entire side, or lack thereof. His face, however, was burned away completely, just like Fosa's. With one small difference: the blinded, gray right eye, staring up at him, bleeding into a pool of blood that had once been a face…

That had been when Iscom had woken up. And he was damn glad of that. Who knew what his subconscious would have seen fit to add next? Would Yuo wind up covered in injures, comatose? Would Brash have been the one to carry her limp, bloody, body back to Iscom, pleading for him to do something, trailing a mix of his blood and hers where he walked?

Or would it have been an entirely different scene? Back in the ship once more, all of them killed, and Iscom left wandering, broken? Or would he have died as well? Hopefully neither. He had enough nightmares of his own, but he didn't envy what nightly tortures Badri faced. Did he even have dreams? He must have; the biocomputers were almost exclusively for parts of his mind usually conscious. He might not understand the speech in the dreams, or see them, for that matter. That was a question best left for Badri himself to answer, if Iscom ever found a time to bring it up.

Iscom finally moved his head enough to check the chrono. He had three hours until he had to wake up. That was time enough to try for sleep again. It's not like his dreams traumatized him more than the memories they came from, and they weren't going away any time soon. Might as well get some rest while he could.

"Come in."

The sergeant sounded weary. Iscom couldn't blame him, not now that he knew what Badri went through on a near daily basis. He also had a vague suspicion that the sergeant was expecting him. The door slid open, and Iscom walked in.

Badri looked remarkably normal. Despite the exhaustion—or was it exasperation?—in his voice, he stood at alert. Yuo and Brash were in the room as well, presumably checking in on Badri. Brash had been worried as well, and he had probably told Yuo what had happened.

"So as you can see, I'm fine," Badri finished, addressing the two junior members of the team. "We all have leave today, so enjoy it while it lasts. Tomorrow we're back at work." With that, they were dismissed.

Badri sighed, tugging at the desk chair. He fell into the chair, and Iscom realized that he was seeing behind a mask. Badri was putting on an act for Brash and Yuo, and probably had been ever since the team had met. Hell, he had probably been acting in front of Iscom too, if last night was any indication.

"You alright?" Iscom asked.

"Is that all I'm going to get from you now?" Badri asked, annoyed. "I'm fine. I've been doing this shit for a year now."

Iscom pulled the second chair out from under the desk and took a seat. "Sorry, I'm still getting used to the idea. Of all the things I thought I might find out about you, the fact that you're constantly poisoned was not on the list." He sighed. "It feels like it's been more than three months, you know?"

"You know how sometimes it feels like time has gone by so fast that it's taken forever?" Badri asked him.

"Yeah?" Iscom replied.

"The past year has kind of been like that," Badri sighed, leaning back in his chair. "It's hard to believe that a year ago, I was in a coma bordering on death. In the past year, I've lost everything, and don't take this the wrong way, but there is nothing I could gain that could make up for that. No matter how many people I meet, no matter how many new relationships I create, new teams I join, I can never have a normal life. I'm lucky to be alive at all," he laughed, but it was humorless. "But I guess I have to make my peace with that. That I'm no longer human," he admitted. The words sounded like a final admission, something Badri had been fighting against for ages, until he had finally given in.

Iscom leaned back in his chair to look at the ceiling. "Do you dream?" he asked suddenly.

"Where did that come from?" Badri laughed.

"A dream I had a few nights back," Iscom replied casually. "You were in it, and I wondered if your subconscious liked to torture you as much as mine likes to torture me. Which lead to the obvious question: Do you actually dream?"

"Yes," Badri answered, "and yes. I don't know what your nightmares are, but I would safely bet any number of credits you cared to name that mine are worse."

"I don't doubt that," Iscom agreed. "At least my worst is seeing other people die. I generally wake up before we get to my own death."

Badri gave a wry smile. "It is rather hard to describe."

"You tried to, when you were drunk," Iscom reminded him. "It didn't make any sense whatsoever."

"I vaguely remember that," Badri said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I think I was long past making sense by the time you got there. Did I ever apologize to Brash for going off on him?"

"No, and he didn't mention it when he called me," Iscom said.

"I won't bring it up, then," Badri decided.

"Also, what was with the colors?" Iscom asked. Badri gave him a curious look, and he clarified, "The lights on your temples. They went yellow while you were… incoherent."

"Oh," Badri said, unconsciously reaching up to cover one temple. "They're indicator lights. Because my body is such a mess, most things that could go wrong have a high probability of leaving me unable to speak. This way there's at least a bit of information before the doctors start cutting me open. Blue means everything's normal, yellow means there's a possible problem with one of my biocomputers. White means a biocomputer has shut off completely, and red means there's something fatally wrong with my heart pump or my power source."

The room quieted, both men lost in their own thoughts. It was yet another reminder of what Iscom could never fully understand—Badri's body was beyond repair.

"It was exactly a year," Badri whispered. "The first anniversary of when we were shot down."

"I know," Iscom said. It had been easy enough to figure out.

"Do you?" Badri asked. His voice was still quiet, but something in his voice seemed to cut. The grief that echoed did not seem to accuse Iscom, but rather chastise. Iscom suddenly felt younger, out of his depth.

"Everyone died," Badri said. "Everyone died, except for me. And Carthers, but he… There's no one left. Everything I knew is just… gone."

There was nothing for Iscom to say. Not to that.

"…Sorry," Badri muttered. He sounded near tears, but his eyes were dry. "I'm fine, I just… Would you mind giving me some time alone? You have the day off as well, you know."

Iscom tried to meet his gaze, but Badri avoided him. "Sure," he said, trying to be as supportive as possible. Sometimes, you just needed to be alone. Iscom understood that, but it didn't make it sting any less.

He still worried about the sergeant. Not because of anything physical, but because of the pain that shone behind his blind eye.