【ｗｒｉｔｔｅｎ ｉｎ ｔｈｅ ｓｔａｒｓ】

[HeyThereLittleBear]

【ｗｒｉｔｔｅｎ　ｉｎ　ｔｈｅ　ｓｔａｒｓ】

ｔｈｉｓ ｗｒｉｔｉｎｇ ｉｓ ａ ｗｏｒｋ ｉｎ ｐｒｏｇｒｅｓｓ． ｐｌｅａｓｅ ｓｅｎｄ ａｌｌ ｃｏｍｍｅｎｔｓ ｔｏ ｍｙ ｉｎｂｏｘ．​

 

[HeyThereLittleBear]

【ｔｈｅ　ｐｒｏｌｏｇｕｅ】​

“Reik… Why don’t you love the stars?” She loves this view of him from below with her head in his lap, watching the way his expressions change as his fingers trace over he face. They are sitting on the hill that they have long identified as “their spot” and it is her favorite because it offers a beautiful view free of both trees and buildings.

“The stars?” He echoes her words back because he doesn’t have an answer for her immediately, his fingers tracing her lips. He can feel her laugh against his skin and it brought a smile to his lips.
“Well… They’re boring. I’ve traveled through them and seen them from all angles and they’re still… Just stars. They’re just these eternal, distant lights in the sky made of burning gas and—“

“Reik,” She whines his name, interrupting him as she pulls his fingers away from her lips and holds them over her heart instead, “You’re looking at them all wrong, my love.” He tilts his head, curious, as she smiles up at him smugly. It isn’t often that she can outsmart him, but when it comes to emotional intelligence and sentiment she was far superior. “They’re not just stars. They’re stories. They’re… They’re home. Look,” She points up at the sky above them, tracing the outline of her favorite constellation, “Orion the Hunter. Did they teach you that one where you’re from?”
He laughs and shakes his head. Of all the things his home planet had taught him, stories that held no scientific value were not one of them. His people were far different in the lack of emotion and sentiment that humans had, but learning from her had been infinitely more engaging than any classroom at home.
“We don’t talk about the stars like that where I’m from. You know this.” He doesn’t reference his home often but when he does, it’s to remind her that he doesn’t have the knowledge she does. In all of the time he’s spent on Earth, he’d found something more important to focus on than assimilation and information gathering. He had a mission at one point but everything had changed when she’d swept into his life.
“Great. You should learn. Okay, so, that one is Orion the Hunter and this one here… That’s Ursa Major – The Big Dipper.” While she talks she presses his palm down against her chest, feeling her heartbeat through her skin. His eyes close and he takes a moment enjoying the rhythm of it and the strength, her body so small but yet her heart so powerful.

When his eyes open, he is smiling at her, realizing she has stopped talking about the constellations. He looks over her face, tracing her tender jaw line and the neat curls of her hair. Her skin, in most places, is a dark chocolate and in others stark white patches. Humans have named the condition vitiligo but for him it is part of what has made her the most beautiful human he’s laid eyes on. She’s ethereal and he couldn’t love her more.

“There’s only one collection of stars that I want to know more about.” She sighs but takes the bait, quirking a brow at him slowly.

“Andromeda, you know that you’re my galaxy.” He leans down and kisses her tenderly, enjoying the feel of her lips against his. It lingers and for a moment he doesn’t care about anything – he has a mission and he is supposed to be reporting in on, work he has to do, experiments to run… But ah, her fingers run through his hair and he can feel how tender and frail she is. Even if she’s everything to him, she’s still a human and he has come to learn just how fragile humans truly can be.

“That’s the dumbest thing to ever come out of your smart mouth.”

♡ ♡ ♡ ​

The screen winked black and he stared at it for a long time, expression somber as he returned again to the present. He wished he could reach out and touch her again, to feel her skin or smell her hair, but instead he was left with only memories.

His memories are ghosts and his heart has become haunted with them. They wake him in the middle of the night while he rests and his body is left feeling… Guilt. Yes, the overarching theme of it all is guilt. He made the choice to love her and made the choice to have a family with her. His choices were what led to her untimely demise and he could feel it to his core that he may as well have killed her himself. Perhaps she would have died easier that way.

He shook his head to clear that line of thinking away from himself, his body trembling as he ran his hands down his face, letting out a long and shuddering sigh. His heart was heavy now but his work was so close to being done.

Reik forces himself to turn away from the memories of the past towards his current prison. The walls of the room are bare of decorations and the room itself is only large enough to contain himself and a metal medical table. Previously, he’d been allowed a small rolling table that had held tools and instruments for him to fine tune his work, but the process was all but done. The surgeries were complete and the medications had done their part. It was time for the final trial before his work could be presented and the expectation hung heavy in the air.

The man closed his eyes for a long moment, gathering himself as he drug his hands down over his face. He’d seen himself earlier in the reflection on his screen and he looked haggard - tired eyes, slumped shoulders, his dark hair a tousled mess, and his clothes wrinkled from wear. This experiment had drained the soul from him, he felt, and his body looked the part.

Reik pressed the small button on his recording device as he walked around the long metal table his subject lay on, fingers moving over the skin that neatly met and merged with the metal of his bionic parts. The man’s breathing is steady and his body is bare save for a thin white sheet tossed over his lower half, giving even the unaware the right to privacy.

“Subject’s vitals are steady and have been such since the animation process was complete. The union zones show sign of fresh healing and have not rejected the non-human materials. Signs of infection noted yesterday are gone and,” He paused as he lifted the eyelids and checked the pupil reaction, “Pupillary reaction has returned. It should be noted that the subject has not been allowed to wake due to information transfer from database. Subject experienced mild seizures during the last transfer...” His voice trailed off as he sighed.

“Subject shows signs of successful union of mechanics and man. The memory base is unable to be tested before the subject is awake. Due to memories implanted, subject is likely to be disoriented and may react violently. To contain incidents, subject has been restrained fully until fully aware testing is completed.”

He leaned over the head of the table, his fingers reaching to the spot at the back of the subject’s neck to find the small internal switch that could be manipulated through the skin. His breath hung in his throat for a moment before he applied enough pressure for it to slowly push into the “engaged” mode.

“Subject awareness process has been started. No change in vitals,” His eyes are locked on the screen that tells him everything he needs to know about the subject on the table. In his peripheral vision, he’s watching the man on the table for signs of animation and hoping for a peaceful transition.

“Heart rate rising,” He noted for the recording, eyes moving away from the read outs instead to watch the man’s face change. His expression had been placid if not totally serene, but now his eyelids were pressed shut hard enough to cause creases, his forehead starting to form lines as the breathing picked up. A low groan rose from the subject’s chest, a haunting but positive sign.

Reik watched in silence as the groan dissipated again into a heavy silence, anxiety forming a knot in the man’s chest as he watched the subject work slowly against the restraints. First, his legs attempted at tugging upward and his arms strained against the cuffs on his wrists, his back arching and chest pressing up against the strap that was secured across it. The hands on either side of him balled into slow fists and his toes curled, every muscle working and every piece of machinery moving as if it were flesh. His neck strained as she struggled to lift his head from the table, another low and terrified groan rising from the back of the man’s throat.

“Easy,” Reik breathed the word to the subject, eyes flicking up to the heart rate on the monitor, “Heart race is accelerating. The subject is testing restraint system… Can you hear me? You need to open your eyes and wake up.” A sense of urgency has leaked into his voice now, his excitement making his careful hold on his emotions loose.

He pressed a hand over the subject’s chest, able to feel his pounding heart just beneath it and nearly able to sense the fear that must be going through him. The man was coming awake in an unknown room, restrained to a table, nude, and possibly in pain. The situation was volatile, but the experiment demanded this process.

“Open your eyes.” He urged, his voice taking on a hint of anxiety despite the fact he was attempting to mask his emotions for the recording.

The subject’s breath hitched in suddenly and harshly as his chest bucked up against the restraints. His eyelids fluttered and jaw clenching before his eyes shot open, scanning the room wildly for something that made sense to his confused and addled mind. Sensory overload was one hell of a way for him to wake up, his heart pounding against his chest as he struggled to make sense of the room that he was in. The man’s mind still rolled with memories, his ears ringing as the distant sound of screams played through his mind like muffled ghosts.

“Subject is conscious. Visibly attempting to connect final memories and current input from his surroundings.” He leaned over the man, his hands cupping on either side of his face and cutting out his peripheral view, “End recording.” A soft beep from his chest informed him that it had cut off and he leaned his face directly over the man.
“Look at me. Orion, I need you to look at me.” The man’s breathing was so harsh that it was hard to tell if he heard at first, his eyes moving but distant as he experienced… Well, Reik wasn’t sure what he was experiencing. He tried his best to soothe the man beneath him, his thumbs brushing soft against the man’s coarse hair, dark hair. Reik closed his eyes and for a moment distant memories danced before his eyes again of his life and he too held breath with Orion as his subject tried to calm himself down.

His breath finally came in as if he were a man coming up from drowning, body going lax on the table as he lay trembling, staring up at Reik with tears in his eyes. The man’s lips moved wordlessly, choking on his own saliva for a moment before he coughed as Reik finally breathed a sigh of relief..
“I don’t understand.” He said finally, his voice ripe with fear as he tried to match the room to his last memory. He remembered pain. He remembered choking on blood and coughing it into his hands and… Screaming. So many screaming that it didn’t even sound human anymore, “I… I don’t understand.”

“I know. I know. You’re safe. Look at me. You’re safe.”


“No…. You don’t understand… I died, Dad.”

 

[HeyThereLittleBear]

【ｃｈａｐｔｅｒ　ｏｎｅ】​

They had taken everything from him already, but still they hungered for more. There was a process that had to be followed for them to determine that he had paid the price for his crimes and it had not been started for him yet. The process of his people was every bit as cold and emotionless as everything else they had, based on information rather than emotion. Instead of relying on others to agree to determine his guilt, they used a program that could assess and determine guilt with near complete accuracy.

The system had been in place for centuries before he had become one of the accused and now was the first time he felt a cold stab of fear in his gut. His actions had been just, he felt, but he didn’t know if they would be considered to be logical. Reik paced the room now as he waited for his escorts to retrieve him for his trial.

As always when he wasn’t immediately pre-occupied on work, his mind drifted back to Orion. His son had been a success on the first animation, a nearly flawless creation and a perfect example of what cold, hard science could produce. From corpse to creation, his son was alive again, walking and talking. His memories had remained despite the brain having been stored for weeks in stasis… But there was something that was off about him.

He caught it in glimpses and small glances at times, watching his son as he interacted with his other creations, the man taller than nearly all of them. Something in the way he carried himself, the stance of his shoulders, or perhaps just the way he spoke… It haunted him to be so unsure of the man he’d made twice now, his mouth forming a soft frown as he mulled over his own memories.

Reik used to be awake with thoughts on whether his Orion would come back, and now he lay awake at night wondering if he had done the right thing to bring Orion back. The humans talked often about the horrible happenings to those who brought back the dead… But Orion had not been human to begin with, surely he wouldn’t be susceptible to such nonsense as what humans had gone through.

He wasn’t given time to further muse over the situation, the soft sound of the door opening on the far wall announcing the presence of his escorts. The two were uniform in their openly displayed apathy, their faces blank of emotion and… Truly anything that would have made them unique. They had no identifying marks to set them apart from each other save for different eye colors, one a startling green and the other a brown so deep it appeared back.

“It’s time, then?” He didn’t need to ask the question, but he did in a small chance to stall the inevitable, his hands wiping on his constantly disheveled clothing. He could taste the fear in his mouth, a sharp tangy flavor that nearly made him want to spit. Instead, he swallowed his fear and held himself tall, his face turning neutral as he approached the escorts.

“Present your arms.” The green eyed one spoke, presenting Reik with a device that looked rather innocuous in nature, just large enough to wrap around his two wrists. He lifted his arms together, his wrists up and forearms touching as he had seen done with others that had gone through this process. The device felt cool against his skin as it was brought up from below and made to wrap around his wrists, molding to his flesh for a long moment. The contact made his skin burst in goosebumps, his hands clenching as the device radiated a gentle golden light against his skin, falling free of his skin and retracting into itself neatly.

In its place was a soft golden light that wrapped around his wrists, a thin beam connecting his two wrists if he pulled them apart. His eyes moved over it slowly, moving his wrists apart slowly to watch the soft golden beam remain intact despite the distance.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

The one with dark eyes commented quietly as the escorts flanked his sides, each one gripping his upper arm to guide him away from the room.

“What happens when the connection is broken?” He asked, musing on how much distance he would have to put between his wrists before the connection would break, his hands turning over to inspect the strange non-restraint.

“Immediate death. My suggestion is to resist an urge to stretch.”

Reik’s lips tugged into a wry smile at the dry and emotionless way the other man spoke, the desire to laugh tugging at him though he knew that would go over just as well as anything else. Instead, he lapsed into silence and observation. These were his people but time away from them had given him a far different perspective of them. He’d grown up much like them - distant and emotionally void, his purpose in life to be education and the pursuit of knowledge - and it dawned on them that the humanity he was accused of was far too true.

His time on Earth had taught him things that a book couldn’t and given him a world where he could pursue both love and learning at the same time. He’d felt passion for something other than the next step in his experimentation and felt… Alive, truly alive than he ever had in his years before. If this was what humanity had to offer him, how could it have been a bad thing?

While he mused on his own humanity that had been birthed on the planet of humans, he let his eyes take in the surroundings. Like most of the ships of their kind, decorations were nonexistent and the layout was rather simple and easy to navigate. They were not creatures of elegance but creatures of logic and intelligence and that showed in the no nonsense approach to interior design. His room was the last and only room at the end of a long hallway that brought them out into a large galley area, the ceiling becoming more of a dome instead of an arch now for the circular room.

The room was empty save for one thing -- the pod. The lid of the pod was opened and he was dimly reminded of human caskets - it looked like one with the plush interior and body-shaped design, though the inside of it was made from a soft gel material. He’d heard of the pods before but had never seen one in person, much less been put inside of it.

The escorts brought him to the very edge of it before stopping, their firm grips releasing his arm in unison. His arms fell lax in front of him and he stared down into the soft yellow goo that would decide his fate in utter silence.

“You are to enter the pod and lay flat. The pod will close around you. You remain inside of your pod until your judgement has been reached. Your sentence will be displayed on the pod once it has been determined. You will be incapable of telling untruths. You will be incapable of refusing to answer a question.”
The man’s voice and affect was flat as he spoke, neither of them wavering in their set stares on Reik.
“It’s a date, then.” He murmured, his voice resigned as he shuffled to turn his back to the pod. His rear sunk down into the goo slowly as he sat himself into it, the material surprisingly lacking in temperature and sensation that he could feel. His feet swung over the edge and he settled them down into the feet of the pod, his body laying down on its side as he curled up in a fetal position.
There was no sensation as the goo engulfed him, his eyes shutting as the yellow started to seep up over his cheek. The lid closed in silence over him as he sunk fully in the materials, his mind drifting as the last of the material pressed around him. It was only then that he could feel it, slightly warm around him and pressing in on all sides, lacking of the wet sensation he had imagined it would feel.
Again, he found himself unable to focus on figuring out the sensations happening to his body and his mind drifting against his will, his body fighting against it as he tried for just a few more moments to stay awake. There was a moment where he lingered in limbo, his mind half-alert and feeling the warmth spread through him before it finally took its final hold, his thoughts drifting and everything in his body turning lax.

As he relaxed, the breath he’d been holding let out, the air bubbles bursting nearly immediately as the goo pressed into his body, invading him as his consciousness drifted away from the situation. It filled his lungs, his throat, plugged his mouth and nose to ensure he was completely engulfed in the material. It flowed through him and he drifted away now, his mind drifting to where the goo wanted him to be.

For him, everything was black at first, as if he were falling asleep and incapable of dreaming. His sense of time was skewed, seconds seeming to drag by as he struggled through the murk in his thoughts. It was all clouded and thick, like a morning fog on earth.

He saw himself, then, a man alone and standing tall in the fog. In third person, he watched himself wander through the fog, his head swiveling as he tried to make sense. He followed behind his own figure curiously, watching the man as he found his way to a single chair that sat in the fog. The dream Reik sat on the chair, his hands folding in his lap as he waited.

Waited? He wasn’t sure why he thought that the man was waiting for something other than the feeling of expectation and the way that the other version of himself staring expectantly into the distance. He approached behind himself and aligned his vision with where his other’s eyes were locked. It was nothing but darkness and swirling fog, the area devoid of everything else. He let out an aggravated sigh before settling himself behind his duplicate.

In this place, time passed differently if it passed at all, Reik’s sense of it certainly seeming off. There was no light save for the non-source that seemed to make the accused visible to themselves. He tapped his own arm to keep a rhythm and attempt to keep track of time, though even that seemed to be faltering. Though the rhythm was one tap her second, he found that the fog seemed to enjoy altering his sense of time, swirling around his tapping fingers. He could feel phantom fingers tapping their own rhythm against his skin, and times where sensation disappeared entirely.

The fog was to take away all distractions from everything else, he assumed, and make the accused focus only on the trial at hand. He thought back to what the escort had told him - he would be unable to tell untruths and unable to refuse to answer questions. He circled himself, coming to stand in front of the other Reik.

“Your eyes are green.” He commented, a blatant lie from his mouth. The other remained unphased both by the man stepping into his line of view and the comment. His lips tugged down into a frown as he lifted one of his hands, bringing it directly in front of the other man’s face. Swiftly, his fingers balled into a fist that thrust through the man’s head, which turned out to be every bit as solid as the fog that lazily twisted around them.

So, Reik himself could lie, but perhaps it was the dream version of him which wouldn’t. A projection, perhaps? He mused over it, trying to figure out the situation and put it together. It was then that the Reik reacted, a soft sigh of relief coming from his lips. He turned on his heels to find that another figure was striding out of the shadows towards another chair that had appeared directly across from the existing one.

A woman approached slowly through the fog, her clothes visible first before herself. She was tall and thin, her body wrapped in an all white suit in stark contrast to the eternal black that lingered around them. Her hair was so blond that it looked to be spun from silver, hanging past her shoulders to her waist. Her face was slim with a small and pointed nose, her eyes shocking in their lack of… Anything. There was no pupil or iris, simply blank white eyes that gave no indication of sight.

She could see, that much he could tell from the way she approached and seated herself in the chair, but her face was difficult to read. Her expression was painfully neutral, her lip a solemn line as her iris-less eyes stared into the dream Reik. In response, he found himself circling back around to behind his other self, watching the situation unfold.

“You are accused of abandoning your mission. You are accused of allowing your own to die. You are accused of illegal reproduction. You are accused of spreading information determined to be private.” There was no question or inflection in her voice, her tone nearly robotic with its lack of emotion, unsettling even for himself. “First charge - abandoning your mission. Please state your case.”

“Thirty years ago, I was given information on a race that had become insidious to other planets. Starting from their own planet of Earth, they have moved from settlement to settlement and depleting the resources on each new planet. The creatures were studied from my base but our specimens were flawed. They had become contaminated from their travels and had reproduced with other species. We were working with incomplete materials.”

“I needed complete materials to study them properly. I volunteered to go to their home planet, the nest in which they all were flowing from. I was largely unnoticed on their planet on my arrival. Their planet itself is dying from their very existence on it. The ozone layer is damaged and their climate is nearly inhospitable. Overpopulation has become a major threat to the planet from their strong desire to reproduce and their desire to keep every person alive despite logic. They are based highly on emotions and experiences. They seek out illogical thrills in order to have adrenaline rush through their bodies, which provides them with excitement and exhilaration. They are sturdy creatures that can survive great trauma. The same cannot be said for the other creatures on their planet. They have caused mass extinction and eradicated millions of species of plants.”

“As a whole, I agreed with the mission I was given. They needed to be eliminated. I took samples as privately as I could - they proved to be savage creatures when they knew one of their own was missing and discovery was not an option. They are rather easy to kill one-on-one, but studies showed that they are extremely difficult to remove when in groups.”

“The creatures have a taste for war and they seem to enjoy the violence. Their society revolves around it, makes sport of it, shows of it… It’s almost impressive how they hunger for it.”

Watching himself describe the humans in such blatant terms was almost gut wrenching, his affect every bit as flat as the woman’s, though there was the hint of a frown on his face. He felt a pang of stress in his chest, his hands placing on his dream state self’s shoulders, falling through it at the last second. His fingers curled in frustration as he fought the urge to lash out, his breathing heavy as he struggled to keep himself calm.

This was his trial but he truly wasn’t able to speak in his own defense. There was nothing that he could do - consciously do, at least - that would help his case. It was… Facts. It was nothing but facts, as with everything else that his people believed in. His teeth ground together as he struggled with his upset and his anger, pacing behind himself as his dream self continued.

“I was able to go largely unnoticed on the planet for years, but with the social nature of humans, it was noticed that I was constantly alone. I made the decision to immerse further into their behaviors - it would help me to better understand and to track them. I participated in their dating rituals and was able to learn about their practices.”

【ｉｎｃｏｍｐｌｅｔｅ】​