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The dream is always the same.
Red water beneath him. Black sky above him. His legs are unseen but his steps slosh and echo as he moves towards annihilation. The nightmarish part begins with the sounds of a dying animal and the blaze of a siren. Ladders rise from the water, twisted and rusty, reaching nowhere. Emergency warnings flash, full of glitches and dead pixels, as if the words have no hope of survival.
And then the end of the dream comes through a sunrise, which grows so bright it burns up everything that he thought he were, but which refuses to take his life in the process. Sometimes he runs towards his end, in the sea of red and black agonies, arms held out in love.
He doesn't expect to wake up, and there were times he wished he didn't, but he does.
It speaks volumes about his existence that the mere act of waking up (WAKE UP) is difficult.
Curly lies there for a few minutes (18 YEARS, 4 MONTHS, 2 DAYS) in a bed specialized for someone – some thing, he thinks, in his worst moments – with his disabilities. He lies, like Jimmy lied so the crew of Tulpar thought (JUDGED) he had caused the disaster, ate of him (PARTIED) and saved (LOST) him. To kill the lingering dream, he grounds the stump of his arm into his working (STARING) eye like a normal person might pluck sleep residue off their lashes.
Then, he's reminded that one of his surgeries lets him blink without pain, and the relief of doing so is what extinguishes the hallucinated flashes of red text.
He doesn't remember much from his time as a human worm on a sinking ship, but he lives with the splinters. Slow and careful, he fastens his stump to his mechanical hand. It lets him access the remote, and the bed lifts him up into a sitting position, not unlike the one he was found in, frozen inside a cryo-chamber on the wreck of a freighter, which drifted off the core systems and was found by a deep-salvage team.
The deep-salvage team kept him in cryo-sleep on their own ship, in fear of him expiring if they woke him too early. Pony Express sent them a message that said they wanted their captain woken at once, suggesting that as he had no fingers or toes to sign confidentiality disclosures, he could hold a pen between his teeth.
Then a copy of Tulpar's black box was leaked to the public. Regardless if the leak was done for money or morality, it created a galactic media storm, which Curly slept through. The black box had advanced logs that monitored each mishap to deduct it from crew pay. Tulpar's last trip held many mishaps. It made it possible for journalists to create a close reconstruction of what had happened on board, from details like three ordered pregnancy tests (thrice as expensive in space) to stealing stuff from the cargo room (worth years of pay).
The public already had a low opinion of Pony Express, due to an old campaign of theirs to implant zappers in the beds so crew members only slept their allocated five hours, and opinion had sunk lower when the company went fully automated. They tried to argue that automation would've hindered what came to be known as The Tulpar Disaster, but even in very late stage capitalism, public opinion held some sway. Soon, Pony Express was sued for ruining the image of Dragon Breath Dental Care, which was now nicknamed Dragon Death in the media. The final nail in the coffin was a study that concluded that long-term use of the mouthwash could lead to hallucinations even if one didn't swallow.
Both companies declared bankruptcy. The hunt to find people - and not AIs - to be held responsible was ongoing, but there were lawsuits, as the victims' families and human rights organizations refused to stand idly by.
Physically and mentally destroyed as he was, Curly was unaware of these lawsuits, yet the settlement money was what let him become less destroyed
Contemporary medicine had its perks once one had the means to access it.
After fastening the stump of his other arm to the mechanical wrist, it is easier to attach his legs, one by one.
Gingerly, he tests his weight, getting ready. Then he gets up. He puts one foot ahead of the other. And then he walks.
Only a person with years of surgeries and physiotherapy behind them can know the relief of standing up and walking without agony. There's pain, but it varies like the weather, and less painful days he damn near dances into the bathroom. Today, he is too tired to dance, but he does take a slight twirl as he drips his eye with prescribed droplets to soothe the insistent itch of the sclera.
He takes a long shower. His body wash foams well and smells like cocoa butter. His shampoo, like oud, and it fluffs his hair-implants enough to hide the spots where the burns were too severe for the implants. Stepping out of the shower, he lets his body and curls air-dry, relishing feeling clean and smelling warm and earthly instead of cold and medicinal.
By the sink is an electric toothbrush with a flattened bristle, a packet of dental thread, and a plastic cup that is used for water. His orthodontist - who assisted him with his persistent teeth grinding - had recommended him a mouthwash, and he had stared at her and then panicked. She helped call his psychiatrist and stayed with him on the floor of her office, apologizing afterwards when she understood what had happened, not running away or judging him.
(JUDGEMENT).
He blinks hard. He stops at the threshold of the living room, which sometimes looks too much like a lounge, despite him repainting the walls in lush shades of green and installing a large aquarium.
Slowly, he closes the bathroom door in front of him, locks it, then opens it again.
But the exercise was for naught as he accidentally catches his reflection in the mirror.
The facial reconstructions are almost good enough to resemble how he had once looked, but technology has not yet come far enough to replace full sensation of nerves, making him aware of his face like a well-fitted but foreign mask. One of these days, a scientist who manages the puzzle of fully reviving scar tissue will get a Nobel Prize in Medicine, but even then Curly might struggle. He's seen the photo, after all. Everyone has.
Captain frozen in space for eighteen years.
If the articles and news reporters spoke the truth, they'd call him a worm.
On the photo of the cryo-chamber, he had been covered in soiled bandages and a stained blue hospital gown, the visible flesh red and leaking, his humanity contained in a loosely-hanging jaw and a wide eye, whose tears had been captured by the ice and then by the high quality of the camera. If he felt particularly cynical on the behalf of human empathy, he'd venture that it was the frozen tears that had won the hearts of the public.
No one but his doctors knew that he had cried more when he had to learn to dress himself again. Now he simply goes through the motions, preferring soft bamboo fabrics in warm beiges.
Most had been horrified by the photo, but horror with a kind of yearning within it, an inability to look away. He is sympathetic to them because he knows how it is like to be unable to look away from horror. Some had said it was cruel to wake him up again, and he is a bit less sympathetic to these people, despite understanding the sentiment better than most. But even his crew had kept him alive, if not only to eat chunks of him, despite him begging them to kill him through guttural groans and whimpers.
He realizes, numbly, that he is hungry. The promise is good food in the fridge makes him brave enough to go into the living room. Maybe he'd be more sympathetic towards himself if he permanently lost his appetite, but even on bad days he likes to eat.
He prefers things that taste fresh and expire fast. Fruits and vegetables, mostly. He buys them pre-cut, something he had scoffed at when he was younger because he thought it lazy, until he had to deal with fainting at the sight of a kitchen knife.
He makes himself a cup of iced coffee, to be eaten with a few frozen pieces of Banalon, the genetic crossing of banana and honey melon, sweet and cold enough not to trigger his sensory issues.
Dimly, he wonders if any of his dead crew members would've liked Banalons.
Next to a vase with hibiscus flowers, Anya leans on the kitchen counter, smoking a synthetic cannabis cigarette like she did before they boarded. Her large eyes are lidded and her skin is deathly pale, with mascara residue around her lashes and brown stains on her chin, but she looks more alive than she did when he first began seeing her.
For a long while he'd wondered why she dreaded feeding him painkillers on Tulpar, until he realized what his sounds probably reminded her of, including that of crying out for help and being ignored. He is so ashamed of not taking her accusations more seriously that he never speaks to her before she speaks to him.
RoUgH nIgHt? she asks, voice abstract like metal filers and yet he finds it nice.
"Yeah. Slept kinda badly, as usual. Everything feels close to the surface."
MaYbE yOu NeEd SoMe SwEeTeNeR iN tHaT, she says, gesturing with the cigarette to his cup of iced coffee.
"I prefer real sugar," he says, and she smiles when he takes four spoons of it into his cup.
UnDeRsTaNdAbLe, she says, then takes a long drag from the synthetic cannabis cigarette. It gives her a cinematic vibe, as it is designed to look like the vintage deal as seen in old movies, without the health concerns. From experience he knows it'll be fully charged and filled when he gets around to using it, which he does when his pain gets too bad.
The couch is huge, taking up most of the floor, but it is also soft, green and nice to sleep on those days that he can't lie in his own bed because of fear that he'll wake up among blues and oranges and bright light. He likes to eat on the couch, too, sipping his coffee through a straw and eating the Banalons one by one. He decides to start his work day, putting a wooden board over his knees, but catches an elbow in the corner of his eye.
On the other side of the couch is Swanson, sitting with his back straight, busy with a book of mathematical puzzles. His breath is audible but calm. Before, when it was shallow like a dying bull's, bullets were spit out from his chest at the rougher exhales.
YOu EnJoYiNg ThAt GiRlY wOrK? he asks without looking up.
"Yeah," Curly answers with a wry grin. "I never expected to get into architecture. But I already had the right math courses down, and I liked drawing when I was a kid."
HMf. SuIt YoUrSeLf.
Curly nods and raises his pencil.
As he refuses to work with anything related to space, he works with Earth's underwater architecture. And as cannot stand the thought of being responsible for places where people live, he designs underwater cemeteries. It might sound morbid to work so closely with death, but it's not as if he can forget it, present in the scar tissue that stretches across him just as oddly as the reconstructions, felt every single time he moves.
He thinks of his job like building homes for those that are beyond hurt. He devotes special attention to mass graves, like those dedicated to miscarriages and stillborn, or those with no next of kin. Daisuke's mother had put in a special request, and although it took him a while, he made the family chapel as beautiful as he could, in a graveyard with orange seaweed floating in the currents like oak trees in winds, and light fixtures in a low purple color, like it was always a misty autumn night beneath the waves.
He also just likes working with a pencil against paper, old-fashioned but easy to scan. It's precise enough work to hold his attention for hours. The scratch of pencil against paper remind him of a gentler version of the voices that leave him.
After a few hours, he takes a break, not fond of breaks but aware he needs them.
Like clockwork, Daisuke is sprawled out across the other side of the couch. He's playing on a game-boy, another retro item that became trendy again. The game itself is more advanced, some sort of remake starring a small purple dragon that Curly always forgets the name of but knows that Daisuke loved.
WaNnA pLaY?
"Thanks, but no thanks. Not really in the mood. Maybe later?"
Daisuke smiles and gives him a thumbs up.
Then he uses the same hand to reach up to his head (ALERT) and itches a little too hard (ALERT) and the skin between his brows parts like a wet cake -
Desperately, Curly looks around for a distraction.
If he were normal, he'd get lost in a screen, but he doesn't own any. It's a weird trigger, screens, but he spent so many nights relaxing beneath a particular one, trying to find that dead pixel that Anya said was there, the 0.1% of the 9.99% of germs killed (ALERT) the survivor that ought to have been put down (ALERT) being a black space and not a man -
He stops the spiral a second time by grabbing a nearby headset. A playlist of heavy rain drowns out the shaky rasp of his own breath. The sound of his panic and pain is annoying even to his own ears, doubly annoying in how the body remembers even if the mind forgets, despite the mind managing to somewhat soothe the splinters left after the ship that wrecked its captain. Usually, it's enough with the bubbling of the aquarium but this time he needed more.
When he tries to get up to take a walk, he sees a figure squatting near the exit of his apartment. The hallway is blurred like the shades of green are beneath redish black watercolors (ALERT) but he recognizes the dirty tracksuit and shaggy brown hair (ALERT) and despite the blur the red-rimmed brown eyes are lit with envy and regret and madness (ALERT!) as the hands holds out a gobbet of -
Curly has to listen to the sound of rain for the rest of the afternoon.
In the evening, there is a delivery to his door, shoved through from the outside and in. Thankfully, the figure from before is gone, no longer blocking the hallway. Curly knows what the package contains, but he still startles at seeing it, like he does sometimes when getting messages even if Pony Express is no more.
(AFTER ALL THE…)
He steels himself and walks over, because it is a package of food items, not a letter of resignation. The package contains mostly fruit and vegetables, but also a few household items. Sorting through them makes him feel human, until he sees something he didn't order. Along with the replacement-head for his electric toothbrush, came a free bottle of something horrifying. It's not the same brand, a bottle of aqua and fluorine without neither alcohol nor a minty taste, and yet it is too fucking similar.
He throws up.
The bottle of mouthwash hits the ground among his gagging noises, chunky liquid flushing up his throat, the taste in his mouth of acid and coffee and fruit, creating a mixture that drips down on to his sweater like blood, and it happened so many times, the choking and the gagging, the hiccuping and the sobbing, sounds that meant nothing to his crew, agony destroying language but not always the memory of the experience, because he could and can hear what his own noises meant, please I can't do this anymore please put an end to it PLEASE just kill me please please please -
As he is vegetarian, the taste of his own flesh is closer to the surface after he has vomited than after he has eaten. He falls, barely registering the rug dampening the impact to his ass, before he hides his face underneath his palms, though he can neither feel his hands nor the skin of his cheeks. His tears are not artificial, however, and somehow it helps to see them drop hard against the rug, instead of seeping from his eye like a drain, crystallized in ice and in photos.
He sees arms in the corner of his eye. Four pairs of them. Stretching outwards.
They spill around his head like his curls do around his face.
Eight palms lay flat on his back. Holding there. Holding on. Holding him up.
And yet he slumps forward when he remembers that they are dead because of him.
No, others might've corrected him, they're dead because of a man who went crazy after realizing there would be consequences for committing sexual assault. Curly wishes he could hate Jimmy, purely and cleanly, like the public does. Even the people who pointed at the stress of working for a company like Pony Express and living in isolated conditions, combined the news of an uncertain future, could not forget the man's personal responsibility in his acts of rape, murder and forced auto-cannibalism.
(There was also the instance of Anya's corpse being ... opened ...)
Curly slumps further down. To them Jimmy was a monster. To him, Jimmy had been a friend for longer than he had been an enemy, a mess of a person who he had come to know better than anyone through the years, someone he thought had his back and currently one of the people behind him. Jimmy's fingers dig in like they wanted another taste of him and at the same time wanting him to stay alive, feeding him pieces of himself while the corpses of the rest of the crew were present, somehow not edible and pure like Curly was to Jimmy, maybe simply because he couldn't talk back.
It's okay, captain. It's just a bottle of mouthwash. Don't lose your mind over it.
It's a crueler joke, that it's Jimmy's voice that Curly understands the best, like it lives underneath his burnt skin.
Jimmy, who was the one to feed him painkillers when his consciousness was like that of a colicky child, so that he could only twitch and moan as rough fingers forced his mouth open and kneaded his throat to trigger the reflex to swallow the pills, until he fell back, hurt, but also grateful for numbness.
Jimmy, who talked to him until the very end, mutterings at first like a stern father telling a child to eat their dinner, and then like a child crying about fixing everything, and finally acting as if he was the missionary of a bloodied sock-puppet Jesus ready for his resurrection.
Jimmy, who made it possible for the worm to survive, when most people said his life - maybe not as it is now, but even as a worm he'd had the chance of his current life - was a fate worse than death.
Curly turns his head to the left side, staring at them with the eye that doesn't work.
Anya is the first one he sees, smiling at him while scratching at the brown stain on her chin, like he wasn't aware of the vomit on his own. Swanson makes a disgusted face, but it has an undertone of understanding, because he is no stranger to waking up smeared in his own body liquids. Daisuke mouths, Damn, sorry man, while he raises his brows, raising the axe wound along with them. Jimmy is the most shadowed, and he has a bullet wound in his forehead mirroring one of Swanson's, but he looks less peaceful than they do.
Curly's breathing evens out, and he feels their hands disappear. They saved him, in the end, regardless of their intentions.
He'd loathed it, at first. Living that could not be called living. Learning about what had happened to him after the world already knew all about him and his ship. Carrying the weight of his crew members, the weight of the ship that went down without him, but took so many pieces of him with it.
Almost by accident, life went on. He'd done his dumb surgeries, seen his dumb shrinks, did his dumb exercises, walked his dumb walks, and suddenly, he was moving better and freer than before.
Touching the bottle of mouthwash like it's on fire, he manages to hide it underneath the rug. He'll text a friend to come rid him off the bottle when she has time to do so. And just like that, the relief extinguishes the last remains of the siren blaring in his head, because he is reminded that he has a friend.
Thinking of it makes him smile like he has a secret. But it's one of many good things that he is allowed to have, and he tries to list them to himself, as an exercise. He has friends and doctors who take him seriously. He has a flexible job, disability checks, and settlement money. He has a nice home and some nicely kept fish. He has good food and good drinks, and he has a plan to visit the half-underwater city of Neo-Aalesund to see his designs in person from a safe distance, when his health gets better. His friend is the one who suggested he do it. He met her during group therapy for burn victims. At nineteen she'd rejected a man at a pub, so he threw acid in her face, and as a result all her smiles look wry, reflected in the tanks in the aquarium store that she manages.
She told him that it had helped her to think of her spirals – panic attacks, not unlike his, with triggers she calls dumb just like he does with his own – not as knots, but as curls, easier to manage when one is soft with them.
"I wanted to die more than anything," he'd told her while day were out hiking together, sitting underneath a night sky so smoggy that there were no stars, more soothing than bright light.
"So did I," she said, eyes widening before closing tightly. "Sometimes I still want it. Mostly I just gotta wait it out."
So, he waits a few minutes (18 YEARS, 4 MONTHS, 2 DAYS) before he gets up from the floor.
Standing up. Walking on. Not only surviving but living. He peels off his dirty sweater, folding it up to a ball on the floor with the stains as a hidden core, before he stops by the aquarium.
One of the black moor goldfishes stare at him with its big eye, sinking and rising as if it can't decide which way to go, until he makes the choice easy by throwing some fish flakes into the aquarium. Seeing the fish eat wakens his own appetite, and if this is his second awakening today, this one feels easier. He decides to make a stew with the new produce, careful not to look at the lump under the rug.
When he uses his mechanical fingers to break apart some of the larger pieces of potato, he feels a presence just behind him, and he can tell by the smell of minty breath, gun smoke and horsehair that it isn't Anya.
You sure you don't want some meat in it, captain?
"Fuck off, Jimmy," he says politely, and focuses on preparing the food. A small, slow and careful life is still life.
The dream is the same as always, his unseen but not unheard feet deep in the water, but tonight there are no twisty ladders and flashing warning signs, nor a sunrise that burns it all up. The water has been changing for a while now, more pink than red. It will never be fully pure, but then again, maybe it never was.
In the dream, he keeps a small amount of lucidity, not unlike the lucidity he had as a worm. With this part of himself that refuses to die, he hopes that waking up will be a bit less difficult tomorrow.