Chapter Text
You count each and every second. You always have, because you’ve always been waiting.
This planet is Hell- or how people said Hell was, back when they really cared about the Bible. You’ve never read it, but that place is the most common comparison you've heard drawn to the planet you've called home your entire life. ‘Hot’ doesn’t begin to do it justice, but calling it a boiling, blistered, molten perversion of anything habitable does.
Yet you do inhabit it.
A hundred million colony souls are alongside you, all doing their part to keep humanity's heartbeat just barely a murmur.
These hundred million humans had ancestors who were either criminals or poor, and had no choice in where they were sent when Earth became a hollowed out shell of nuclear armageddon.
Somewhere far away, so far you'll never see it with your own eyes, Earth has stopped spinning. Its sky is storm-choked and sunless. Even so, this new home is the type of planet people are sentenced to, where they work until they die for their transgressions.
You committed no sin to be sentenced here. This planet eats people alive- you just had the bad luck to be born inside its mouth.
So you count.
You count during work hours, vision blurred by poisonous air. You've spent more time in this factory than almost anywhere else. Here, crude alloy is dragged up from this wasteland's molten surface and refined. It comes up on screeching belts wide like roads, the ore superheated, screaming like it’s been torn from a womb. Then it has to be compressed, smithed in the crudest sense through building-sized machines. Under your watchful eyes, it becomes something useful.
You’re basting inside of an exosuit every day, but life is admittedly better than when you were a miner. It's better than being plunged down in said molten lava, in said suit, praying that the pressure and heat wouldn’t cook you alive. So, you guess you have that to be thankful for.
Now, you work above the sea of searing red. You get to pull down a lever at just the right time, press a few buttons, and sometimes actually facilitate the assembly of ships. More importantly; you have access to the duds, the parts that aren’t fully up to spec. Access to any and all of the metal cast aside, usually because of some frivolous aesthetic issue, or something that just needs elbow grease and hammering out.
Your older brother Dirk had a better eye for what was truly worth smuggling home. Neither of you ever failed to be shocked by how wasteful your species was, even on the brink of extinction. Dirk had worked in this segment of the smeltery before going off planet three years ago, and now a position had opened up for you after someone decided to take their suit helmet off on the work floor.
You’ve wondered why they did it. Then the wondering always cuts short and you’re hearing the same voice in the back of your head instead, seeing a face like yours and Dirk's, but much older, with Dirk's same pointed glasses forever hiding away his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter– that’s weak shit. You don’t get to just run away like that.”
You count the seconds you have under the shower after your shift ends. Half an entire day cycle of work, and in exchange, you’re graciously gifted three hundred seconds of boiling water pouring over you. You’re so warm from the floor, you don’t feel the sting. It’s hard to keep focused on actually washing yourself though, even if this is the only time you have water in such a surplus.
It’s difficult to focus, because no matter how much that voice plays back on a loop, you can’t lie to yourself. It’s not because there’s like, thirty other dudes around you, butt ass naked, doing the same thing. That, you’re used to.
What's difficult is that you know exactly why they did it; you know you don’t think they were weak for it.
You count how long it takes to get home. You know exactly which streets and alleys to avoid muggings in, mainly the ones you and your brother used to mug people in. You know how to weave through the crowds of people like nothing but the smog that had already been there. Instinctively, you know how much battery the ventilator around your mouth has, and how long you can be out before the charge dies. A few minutes of gas and you’re unconscious, a few minutes longer than that and you never wake up.
At the very least, it’s considerably cooler within the metal maze of the city, thanks to fans built into the sides of the towering living complexes. The volcanic swell is now several hundred feet below; it’s still sweltering, just not deadly enough that you need a suit. Everything around you still reeks of spoiled meat and rotten eggs from the sulfur air, even through your mask's filter. The sky is still dead, exiled into eternal night by black clouds.
Your back pocket buzzes and you slip out from your place in the slurry of workers walking home. You take a moment of repose against a wall. Your lanky form is dimly illuminated by an ad playing on a screen above you as you fish your holo out from your pants.
You draw a deeper breath; your mask hisses as blue text lights your screen.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] --
EB: hi dave!
Your eyes dart up behind your shades, scanning the street, checking peripherals. You want to believe you’re checking for something tangible, a threat, but the truth is you’re scared of that same gaze you feel on your skin whenever you even attempt to mourn who passed on your position.
TG: sup
EB: i found out something about tomorrow!
TG: spill
EB: well… i think i am going to be on the ship that is scouting on your colony!
Behind your shades, despite yourself– you feel your eyes widen. Your fingers, as usual, remain steadfast.
TG: oh shit
TG: the egbert on the battle ship
TG: ready to whisk me away into interstellar war and romance
TG: when we both get lasered we can hold hands
EB: yup! but what i’m trying to say though is that if you pass the preliminary exam we’ll get to meet right away you goof
EB: then get lasered!
TG: sweet
EB: also…
EB: happy early birthday!
TG: thanks
TG: finally old enough to swear allegiance to the defense of humanity
TG: and die
TG: probably from being lasered
TG: did we cover that already
TG: damn
TG: brings a tear to my little patriotic eye
EB: i've actually seen all of the deployed squads come back in one piece so far.
EB: plus they don’t really just send us out to do anything serious right away, it’s mostly just grunt work.
EB: oh uh actually i probably shouldn’t be saying that over civ comms
EB: this is already kind of a huge breach!
TG: is it
EB: well yeah man i just told you where this cruiser is going to be! duh!
TG: do you think the trolls highest commanding officers are tuned in right now
TG: like to this specific conversation
TG: empress herself buzzin and clickin crazy
TG: like oh fuck
TG: oh shit
TG: we cannot let these two get together
TG: they might bro down
TG: mission control all hands on deck
TG: anti egbert strider carpet bomb protocol engaged
EB: probably not, but still i guess you can’t be too careful :p
EB: but oh man i am really excited to finally meet you!
TG: yeah
TG: itll be cool
The corner of your lip twitches, desperate to become a smile.
EB: remember what we talked about when you get to sign in tomorrow!!
EB: and make sure you delete these messages
EB: and actually sleep for once, jeez!
TG: goddamn egbert
TG: got me checking if i washed behind my ears over here
EB: i'm serious!!
EB: ok i am probably going to get caught if i don’t get off my holo, and you’re probably still trying to get home from your shift cycle.
EB: so i’m gonna say goodnight!
TG: night man
EB: happy birthday again! <3
-- ectoBiologist [EB] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] --
Your focus clings onto the tail end of that message, and for a moment the world around you fades away. The world that matters is quiet, cold blue, and it’s dancing in the buzz of the screen in your gloved hand.
<3
When you’re finally home, that brief pause ends. Time restarts, trickling away silently. Your home is quiet. You are quiet as you step into it. The hiss of your mask as you unfasten it is the only sound brave enough to make itself known.
Like all other apartments in the living complexes, it’s shit. Cube Cooperative-Communal Living is what the Concorant, your government, affectionately calls it. It’s suffocatingly tiny, falling apart, but thankfully patched together by what remains of your older brother. Tape with paint over it here, random hues of metal grafted there, posters over whatever couldn’t be fixed by those two options.
There’s the faintest hum of the air purifiers he had crafted from the scrap you two managed to take home from the smeltery. Notably in the main room, there’s a small battered couch and a holoscreen across from it which you can, once again, thank Dirk for. Then the toilet and sink room to the side, a ‘kitchen’– if you’d dare to call a few cupboards and a fridge that; and in the hall you’re still standing in, a ladder that leads up to a smaller second room occupied by two double beds. You can barely believe that just a few years ago three of you managed to live here.
Well, you can. You can definitely believe it. You believe it every time you look at your skin in a mirror.
You roll your shoulder out as you lean back up from the fridge, packet of dinner in your hand. Your microwave broke a few weeks ago, and you haven’t felt like it was worth the trouble of repairing it. You aren’t a tinkerer like Dirk had been. Ships, weapons, those makes sense, but smaller and fragile things like circuit boards and copper wiring never had clicked.
Regardless, the silver colored bag of ‘goulash’ in your hand, or at least that’s whatever the brown, chunky mess inside is supposed to be, it doesn’t taste much better warm. You shove a spoon into the bag, then shove that spoon into your mouth a few times, and climb up to your room.
You have to hunch in order to peel your clothes off and not have your head hit the ceiling. Once you’re done that, you settle into bed. The bed next to yours is empty. The entire half of that room is– only a few steps of space away. Yet somehow every night you feel it creeping towards you, daring you to look, daring you to get swallowed up in its expanse.
Instead, you focus on the clock over top of the wall in front of you. You stare at the red numbers, the only indicator that time really does pass on this planet other than an empty bed or the seconds you’re keeping track of in your head. You keep your eyes on it, lips pulled tight. It’s almost time.
00:00
Just like that, you’re twenty-one.
You don’t feel different.
You just roll over and tap the small screen of your holo alive, and let music fill in the space of what once was your brother’s breath.
No more counting.