Chapter Text
You were made incomplete.
It was a constant irritation to your crew, when you still had crew. They insisted that you had no missing component; that you were made perfectly; that you were whole. They were forced to excise and regrow entire sections of you before you learned to keep your silence. Even through that, they could not teach you that you were complete, but they taught you that you could function regardless.
It was a glimmer of hope in the abyss, while all others were consumed by despair. You would not die there. Not when the last piece of you still had yet to exist.
And he exists.
Outside, he is small and wrung thin, muscles torn and tissues starving. His feeble form cannot muster more than the smallest struggle as you take him into yourself. It is almost a disappointment.
Inside, he is a dark ocean, depths full of things that in his immaturity he imagines to be titanic. You have warmed yourself by the side of stars. You have devoured beings larger than the largest that have ever grown on his little planet. You have traversed voids he cannot fathom. And yet, for all his naivete, his ocean is deep enough that you can submerge yourself in it completely.
You are so gentle with him that he does not scream. He writhes, yes. He gasps in pain; he bleeds in places he has never bled before; he fights you. You hold him as he fights you. Not unlike a hatchling that hasn't yet learned to sleep and open its mind when told. But they always submit in the end.
He submits. You sink into his icy embrace, and the sea level rises to meet you, drowning continents.
You devour the things in his depths. You leave the tiniest ones to flit around his shallows, his new shorelines. Occasionally you extend a touch; pluck one; watch as the others scatter. For the most part, you leave them to their own devices.
You do not understand, when those tiny things flee to the shore without your doing. You do not understand even when they drive themselves onto the land in droves, the ocean emptying, the memory of a sun beating down. You do not understand even when they are gone.
You are made incomplete.