The Graveyard at the End of Never #2

Posted on Tue Feb 14th, 2023 @ 5:25pm by Ensign Syaffia & Lieutenant Thraxina & Chief Petty Officer Meredith Corden

1,346 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Mission 1: A Fool’s Errand
Location: Object B55677t
Timeline: After The Graveyard at the End of Never #1
Tags: All of us, all of the time

Meredith's Story

Meredith didn't immediately recognize the young man in front of her. She had not thought of him in years, though they had been very close when she was younger. His death had been ruled an accident though she had always wondered. His grey eyes seemed sad, lost. "Meredith? Is that you?" He seemed confused somehow.

"It's me, William," she said, reaching for his hand without thinking. His eyes were hard to look at. They still seemed so sad.

"You're older," he pointed out, not quite understanding.

"You're not," she said softly.

"I'm scared," he said and he held her hand tighter. "I don't understand. I don't understand why it's anyone's business. I don't understand the problem. It was my great-grandfather. I didn't chose it. My parents didn't chose it. It barely makes a difference. I'm no superman. I can't deal with...I can't go to..."

"You shouldn't," Meredith. "Just talk to people. There are people who love you."

"No," William said. "They don't want me in the world. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be." He slipped his hand away.

"No!" Meredith screamed, crying now. She reached for him but it was like trying to grab water. He slipped through her fingers. He slipped away again and she was alone.


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Syaffia's Story

TW: blood, traumatic injuries

"Syaffia? Syaffia, is that you, my dear?" Syaffia recognized the voice before she saw the speaker. "Dad!" She barely paused to think as she ran into the waiting arms of the tall, handsome and dark-skinned man in front of her. He looked just the way she remembered him: maroon t-shirt, neatly pressed black pants, black boots freshly cleaned so they shone, flight instructor's fluorescent green vest.

The same outfit he'd worn on the day of his untimely death.

"You've grown so tall and so beautiful, my daughter. And is this the uniform of Starfleet?" Her father pulled away from her for just a moment to admire her gold uniform with a proud look on his face. "I always knew you'd become an explorer someday! Tell me, what are you doing with them now? Are you well on the way to having your own ship?"

"Yeah, I guess! I'm in Starfleet Academy now, and I'm on the Midway! My colleagues are great, my roomies are great and I'm well on the way to becoming a pilot, every bit as good as you! Just you see!" Syaffia smiled up at her father's proudly glowing face, expecting some kind of affirmation.

"Oh, sweet Syaffia. You were a fool to follow in my footsteps." The look on her father's face was gone now, replaced by one of grear despondence. Syaffia's expression dropped in a terrible mix of horror and confusion as he pushed away from her, taking three steps back.

"W-Why not?"

"Piloting is dangerous. I told you that so many times. I prayed in my quiet moments that you would never embark on my journey. That you would stick to just riding shuttles instead of flying them yourself." The older man's forced a smile onto his face. "You're my only child, you know. I didn't want to lose you. I still don't." Suddenly he was thrown forward violently, as if hit by an invisible force, landing face first on the ground with a sickening crack. "Dad!" Biting back tears Syaffia ran towards his motionless body. "Dad, wake up. Please! Dad?"

When her father stirred and forced himself to look up next, Syaffia couldn't help but recoil violently horror and fear. His forehead was now raw, bruised and bloody where smooth, dark skin had been before. His nose, once proudly jutting out of his face, was a mangled, misshapen mess. It bled, small droplets of red dripping their way down his nose. She couldn't be sure, but she could definitely see one of his arm bones jutting through his skin. His head was definitely misshapen, dented inwards at the back like something hard and fast had collided with it.

Something like the front end of a fast-moving shuttle.

Syaffia quickly realized what was happening - the question was why and how. She would've asked why and how too had she not been frozen to her spot on the ground with terror. It was happening again. That one fateful day she hoped she would never have to recall ever again.

"You see?" Her father's voice sounded all wrong. The smoothness was gone entirely from it; he sounded wet and croaky and wibbly and not at all like himself. "This is what it does to people when things go wrong. Better me than you, sweetie. I- I gotta go now, I think. Daddy loves you." And with that her father's head slumped to the floor lifelessly, and she could soon feel his hand grow cold in hers.

"No. No no no. Dad? Dad, wake up, Dad-" Syaffia's eyes were at once hot and wet with tears. The roar of engines - shuttle engines - filled her ears then, and she turned to look. Careening towards her, swerving wildly left to right, was a civilian use shuttle, obviously out of control and going way too fast. Rooted to the spot with fear, all she could do was stare as a scream of terror ripped itself from her throat.

She could've sworn that in the brief few moments before impact she saw how the shuttle's pilot, shadowy and indistinct, didn't even seem panicked at having lost control.

All went black.


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Thraxina's Story

There were four of them, three men and a woman, Distruptors, the terrorist group from her own home planet whom she had been tasked with detecting, capturing and eliminating when she had been seconded to the Secret Sentinal force of Stratos City as a political officer. As she reached uselessly for her phaser, no longer where it had been a second ago, she had no time to think about what had happened, where the shuttle and her two subordinates had suddenly disappeared to: that would have to wait. Now was a time to concentrate on survival.

She was surrounded, but her training kicked in. She dived for the big man in front, hoping to blind or otherwise disable him before running for it. No way she could beat four in a fair fight, or even an unfair one. The masked man seemed to be expecting it, parrying her blow with ease and then giving her a rabbit punch to her face, the sound and feel of her nose breaking assaulting her senses as the blow sent her reeling back.

Before she could stumble to the left to escape, the other two men had her by the arms, and the big man treated her to a number of punishing blows, each of which found its target: a right hook to her head which made the world explode into splinters of white light; a left jab to her stomach which made her heave and winded her so she could not even draw breath, and then a tooth loosening upper cut to the jaw which made her head snap back and her eyes roll in her head.

Her head spinning, her guts heaving, she heard the woman's voice, then the agonising impact of a heavy boot between the legs, just where bitch knew it would hurt the most. "Get her on the floor, I want to stamp all over her ugly face!!" spat the voice again. she only had a second to recognise it, before a massive miner's work-boot came down with enough force to smash her skull.

An observer would have believed he was watching some clever mime: although for Thraxina the blows, the pain, the nausea and the disorientation of the beating was all to real, and agonising pain accompanied each blow: she looked no different: no blood, no bruises, no black eyes or broken bones. They could have continued beating her forever and she, would never black out or die, like Prometheus enduring his punishment by Zeus, having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day, forever.

 

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