Time, for all intents and purposes, only existed on the other side of the glass.

This period of stasis had been the strangest he'd ever experienced – if for no reason other than his awareness of it at all. But reasons were ample.

An unending miasma of preternatural screams and distant, vague weapons fire had flooded his senses in ebbs and tides, echoing the discord they had been privy to for the Admiral's brief but frightened announcement and perching upon him, refusing to dissipate. Plasma, burning flesh, the acrid stench of sizzling metal raked at his nose, stung his eyes as gunfire roared on, the sea of agonised howls continuing ceaselessly throughout. Those noises, those smells, tenuous and shapeless, were a mere backdrop to the tightening of his throat, the pounding in his veins – panic, he knew panic when he felt it, heightened by the fact that he could not move an inch.

This wasn't his first rodeo; he knew how stasis was supposed to be. In truth it was far closer to sedation than sleep, time flashing by in an imperceptible, dreamless instant until the reanimation sequence was inevitably fired – by machine or by hand, it made no difference to the mundane, routine procedure. And yet here he was, so minimally conscious that it wouldn't have registered more than a peep on the monitors, but conscious nonetheless, and able to, apparently, dream.

Dream, perhaps, was the wrong word for the endless, looping, eternal phantasm his nearly-but-not-quite unconscious mind had been subjected to.

Limbless, perpetually dazed, his mind was unable to quantify exactly what the apparitions swirling about in terrifying shrieks were; the juxtaposition of their forms, oscillating between huge and black and sharp, and soft and translucent and small, made little sense.

Sense was a process of minds far more awake than his. Rather, the cognitive dissonance simply lingered, unabated, in consciousness' absence, swirling about his being relentlessly, eternally, until, until…

There had never been a time where the reanimation sequence beginning had come with such a profound sense of relief.

That sequence, he knew, took little time at all; but when subjected to it, as time itself seeped through the glass and regained meaning, as frayed ends in the infinite, looping thrum of unconscious thought finally tore free, those scant moments between arousal from near-death and one's boots touching the deck outside felt like forever.

Perhaps, he reasoned – as much as he could, in his present state – those thoughts had been looping in those moments alone, and supposedly thrashing about in a dream-state for the duration of his time in stasis was a figment of his imagination, spurred on by the circumstances by which he had arrived here in the first place.

A familiar cold rush erupted along the length of his spine, akin to liquid nitrogen, from the pit of his stomach to his extremities, wrenching his dazed mind from the deep and flooding it in its icy grasp. There was never a time it had been an enjoyable sensation, lingering somewhere between plunging into a bitterly cold lake and the sort of searing panic that ripped the breath from one's lungs. Such was the function of adrenaline, he knew. It was a necessary – no, critical – part of the procedure, but it didn't mean he had to like the way it awakened the mind and body alike with instantaneous, brutal effectiveness, flooding the mind with the clarity required to fly into whatever situation had presented itself on the Bridge as the jitters from the rush gradually faded.

Yes, this period in stasis had been strange, indeed.

There was nothing clear about his current mental state at all. As the reanimation sequence completed, the unit's piping breaking away from his suit and releasing the godforsaken mask over his nose and mouth, there were only two things filling his dazed mind; one was the relentless, dull pounding of a cracker of a headache. The last time he'd experienced one quite like this, he had been sunburnt and dehydrated beyond belief; as far as he knew, the stasis unit was supposed to prevent exactly this. Why did he feel so fucking dry?

The other was just how disoriented and confused he was. Normal procedure would have left him leaping to his feet and to attention by now, awaiting orders and ready to get on with it; this time he was simply left to squint through the impossibly bright lighting, vague and lost as he blindly swung his legs free of the unit and forced himself to his feet. The Captain would surely have something sour to say about the present state of him.

Except as tried to stand, even which way up was seemed to be up for debate; he'd barely managed to sit up before the dryness of his throat was now significant enough that it left him choking and gasping for breath. He was no use at all in this state. Squinting into the abyss, gulping for air, he steadied his hands against the side of the unit as he awaited orders – and a bollocking from the Captain, or whoever it was that had aroused him from stasis.

You're an embarrassment, Suen. Pull yourself together.

Through the haze of uncertainty enshrouding him, he was sure he could, in fact, hear voices. Perhaps it was the ringing in his head, perhaps hearing damage was the predictable outcome of one too many skirmishes when he ought to have been piloting, but these voices sounded strange – thin, hollow, lingering in an unsettling range between male and female. Willing his vision to settle, he glanced about the Bridge expecting to see his crew, Special Ops, someone.

Someone was, indeed, there. How had he missed that? His own uselessness was beginning to grate on his nerves.

"We arrive for this man, does not wish to die," another thin, pale voice announced right beside him; the jolt that echoed about his system went a long way to clearing the fog in his head, but there's little doubt it was not due to the proximity of the strange creature. No, it was the fact that it had spoken not in Sebiti as he'd rightly expected, but an old, alien tongue he hadn't heard in years, yet nonetheless understood. Heck, in this moment, he couldn't even remember the language's name.

"Eternal life, we wish you give," the voice continued. Near-nonsensical message aside, the creature's impenetrable accent left him scrambling to make sense out of whatever the merry Hell he'd just been told.

By now the infernal lighting on the Bridge had faded – or, at least, his vision had finally adjusted – and the figures standing around him had crystallised into something entirely unfamiliar. The five people standing before him were not Sebiti. In fact, they were like nothing he'd ever seen before. Their colourful faces would seem featureless and dull were it not for matts of fur placed atop their skulls, and though he didn't recognise this species at all, there was a lingering, nagging, profound sensation that he ought to.

But he was not a scientist or a diplomat, he was a military man; the fact that one of them appeared to be armed was not lost on him. These were not the people that were meant to be here.

Enough tooling about. For the sake of the crew – wherever the Hell they were right now – it was time to take control of the situation.

He forced himself to his feet, straightening out before the creatures before him as he ignored the pounding, swirling maelstrom within his skull, squaring his shoulders as he hurriedly set about plucking details about each of his uninvited guests. Immediately apparent was their stature; he'd assumed, wrongly apparently, that they were significantly larger than they were, but alas, they were merely the size of children. Their diminutive size explained their strangely-pitched voices; there wouldn't be nearly adequate enough lung capacity in their tiny torsos for a proper voice. The three closest to him, upon reflection, were likely male – the two smaller intruders appeared to at least be shaped like the females he knew and understood, though he'd been wrong about these things before.

Staring down at them, he soon noticed their apparent lack of armour and thin, clear helmets. There was no bulk to their gear nor, evidently, their respective physiques. Apart from the male standing astride the wisened central figure bearing arms, there was little to suggest a credible threat. Their gear seemed downright primitive. But he had been wrong about these things before, too.

The next course of action seemed obvious. Drawing a breath, he stepped down from the stasis unit and prepared to ascertain their motives.

Or, at least, he intended to. As the universe flipped on its head, it was all he could manage not to crash to the deck in a dishevelled mess. In the next breath he found himself sitting back down with a dull thunk, fingers groping for the ground as his head once again rejected gravity. Swiftly running out of patience as a familiar, tiny, white-hot pebble of rage began to knit itself into the core of his abdomen, he resolved to see to the blasted stasis unit with Aldamarak's preferred methods himself for its failure to deliver him intact and be damned the consequences.

The earliest machinations of chaos had unfolded before him as he'd rocked to his feet. The closest of the five intruders, stinking of old age and degeneration, had apparently capitulated, and two of the others had rushed to his aid in a flurry of activity. The creature was frail, painfully frail. There was little doubt in his mind that such a creature was nearing death. The yellow-haired creature's garbled message made a little more sense when applied to the veritable walking dead before him, which served only to stoke his indignation: what in the name of Gugalanna were these idiots doing with a walking corpse aboard a military vessel, at a classified military base?

It was time to put an end to these antics. Seeking to make his point indisputably clear, he raised his voice over the clamour of alien feet and pitched it, quite deliberately, as far out of the range of such small creatures could hope to replicate as he could. Though he was far from the largest, most intimidating Sebiti officer in existence, the military's reputation preceded it amongst all that mattered, and this child-race ought to be reminded of that.

"Who are you, and what are you doing aboard this vessel?" he announced in the biggest voice he could muster – and what he could muster was hardly impressive. How badly had that stupid, decrepit stasis unit malfunctioned? Rather than the booming, authoritative growl he'd intended, he was left with a strained rasp. His lungs, throat, mouth alike were arid to the point of nearly choking again. What other nasty surprises awaited him as the situation unfolded? Tugging at his core, welling in his throat, the rising heat of rage brought with it a palpable, nagging tension. A potential fuse for the powder-keg building within, he distantly knew, but that knowledge was useless in the now.

The creatures had reeled backward as he pushed himself to his knees, the wisened corpse immediately exchanging paper-thin words with the taller, yellow-headed male while their companions merely watched on in terrified silence. Something twisted in his gut as he observed the pair; something was wrong, wrong, wrong here and as he failed to place it, the tension swelled further.

Think, Za'il, think!

They were not of a species he knew, but he could not shake the sensation that he ought to. They had arrived with one large weapon and nothing more – no bags, no equipment. Their suits were flimsy and archaic, poorly suited to what he knew lay beyond. Only one appeared to speak a familiar language, and poorly at that; they stood before him, scattered, disorganised and terrified. Or, troublingly, three of them appeared soaked to the bone in paralysed fear. The walking corpse had not an ounce of fear about him. No; written all over that face was hunger, entitlement, victory. It struck him as immensely punchable.

There was not a chance they were military. Good. It left him with the upper hand, despite being significantly outnumbered. They didn't appear to be scientists or diplomats, either – they were far too chaotic and undisciplined, and seemed uninterested in truly engaging with him. Perhaps they were civilians...with weapons. Not unheard of, but perhaps not the first logical assumption. There was no call, in his mind, for any kind of civilian from anywhere, to be aboard a Sebiti Juggernaut – least of all one ordered into lockdown.

The obvious struck him. His jaw clenched.

Clearly, these were pirates. Amateur, woefully-underprepared pirates. The one stinking of old age was beyond a doubt their leader, the yellow one his second-in-command presumably, and the motives of the armed male were obvious, but the females, particularly the one hanging rearward, remained a mystery. There was an air of sweat and blood about her, from what he could make of her distance from him. If she was injured, oughtn't they be asking him to come to her aid? The yellow one had distinctly mentioned a man in their brief exchange.

That smaller female, apparently, was not as injured as he initially presumed. The pirates' collective attention was immediately upon her as she spoke in their strange, alien tongue; she persisted even as the elderly one sought to silence her and, unsettlingly, her dark eyes had shot straight past all of her people and found his own. There was an intensity in her stare that left him seized on one knee.

That is, until the armed male inexplicably swung the barrel of his weapon into the female's abdomen. Jaw agape, he watched in stunned silence as the blow left her bonelessly crumpling to the deck, screaming in agony. His first observation had, in fact, been correct after all – she was without a doubt injured. Injured, desperate, and her own kind had simply slugged her in the gut to silence her. Their violence certainly matched the description of pirates.

With the male's weapon trained on the fallen female's skull, the decrepit creature continued his diatribe, beady eyes boring holes into him, but even the stench of the intruder's breath could distract him from the female as, soundless but defiantly biting her lower lip, she forced herself back to her feet. It made absolutely no sense. Was she a prisoner? Were these creatures one of the archaic kind that did not allow their women to speak? Everything in his training insisted he ought to be providing medical care, except all that went out the nearest airlock with the presence of a weapon.

No civilised species was like this. Hell, anything Anuka that showed even hints of this sort of savagery were usually seen to with a swift interdiction, or–

All the technology required to cause trouble, but all they want is magical abilities. Invincibility. Eternal life. Superpowers. And with their millennia of wars behind them, they'll take what they please.

At any other time the realisation would have him seriously questioning his sanity, but in this moment, right now, it punched him in the gut with such ferocity that it left no doubt in his mind. These were Utukka people. Nothing else in the galaxy still left alive was like this. Utukka people with technology, snatching what they pleased, just like Shamar had said a mere day ago.

The fuse was lit.

The yellow-haired male had begun babbling foreign nonsense at him again, but what little of the drivel he could make of it merely confirmed his assumptions. They were demanding immortality like the savages they were, and the yellow-headed creature was not one of them. His movements were too smooth, too deliberate, too mathematical. He smelled of nothing, he did not flinch as his compatriots did when Za'il pushed himself back to his feet. He was not natural, not natural–

Adrammu.

Never in his life had he witnessed an Adrammu, nor had he ever expected to; the abominations had been completely and utterly outlawed for so many centuries that he couldn't quite bring himself to curse his inattention to the obvious when he hadn't a clue what to look for in the first place.

These wretched people had dragged a fucking Adrammu aboard, hadn't they?

Surely not.

Placing a hand gingerly atop the yellow mop before him, he wasn't sure what to expect; if he had misread the situation and this was indeed a living, breathing creature, he'd be content to drag the lot of them out the nearest airlock and find out what in the name of Gugalanna there had been a security breach during a Code Red emergency, and why the fuck Special Ops were conspicuously absent when they were supposedly enroute. Heck, if they showed themselves out nicely, he would even weigh up a non-committal apology for wasting their time and see to it they actually set course to whence they came before he left orbit.

The flesh below the yellow fur was not flesh at all; cold, hard, it lacked everything about flesh that made sense. There was no oil or humidity about its surface, and it did not yield to his fingertips as it ought to have – hair or not. Those fine yellow strands were too uniform, too perfect to be real. Again, the synthetic creature did not flinch, even when being touched; in fact, it simply responded with a smug grin.

The fuse had burned. The fire erupted.

It had been a significantly long time since the Sebiti Rage, notorious for a million and one reasons from one end of the quadrant to the other, had gripped him. Perhaps it was a product of age and wisdom, the tempering of a young Officer into a hardened Commander; there had been little reason to trigger it in recent years. It had been building and building over these past few months, though – that much was undeniable. One thing had added to another and, having been presented with the most absurd of crises in this moment, his senses had finally surrendered to its white-hot vacuum, flooding every fibre in his being with molten metal as the colour faded from his vision.

A singular thought, clear as a bell, gripped his psyche. Neutralise the threat.

The strength the Rage afforded him could never be understated. Child-like shouts echoed through distant haze as he seized the Adrammu's head with both hands, dragging it from its feet and twisting until a satisfying pop released its body from its skull.

One down.

As little of a threat as the old bastard presented physically, it was the ideology he peddled that made his stomach churn; the creature was at least a metre shorter than him, crippled, held together with a downright comical frame, and yet he still had the audacity to swipe protectively at the raging soldier. Thinking little more of it, he swung the only thing he had on hand – the Adrammu's head – at his target's skull, then discarded it as the decrepit fool folded to the deck.

Two down.

In the next breath a deafening crack had ripped through the atmosphere, instantly followed by a sharp, searing blow to his chest. Of course, the armed one; a moment of clarity bubbling through the Rage thanked the creature's poor aim, because though it certainly hurt like Hell, it was unlikely he'd be able to immediately charge the brute had he fired at his head rather than his chest. The Rage pushed through the pain effortlessly, and even before he'd mown the wretched creature down, his suit had set about doing its damn job and knitting across the exposed, wounded flesh. At least something was performing in this godforsaken place.

The tiny male proved simple to disarm; having chosen to delay reloading his weapon, he provided absolutely no resistance. In fact, he had the good grace to simply drop his rifle as Za'il picked him up and thrust him across the room, then immediately lose consciousness as he struck the far wall.

Three down.

A momentary flash of colour returned to his vision as he bore down on one of the remaining intruders – one of the females, paralysed and trembling with fear – and, in a brief second of hesitation, he wondered just how much damage an unarmed, terrified, tiny female could do. Hitting the wall seemed to do the trick with her compatriot; he would deal with them when he had time to think. For now he needed them unconscious and out of his way. She, too, offered no resistance and obediently sailed through the air, and he turned to the final intruder as the larger female slumped silently against the far wall.

Four down, one to go.

It appeared the injured one was the only member of the invasion party possessing common sense. Having witnessed her blasted Adrammu beheaded and her compatriots effortlessly beaten unconscious, she'd snatched her helmet from the floor and fled as fast as her tiny legs could take her. Good. One less idiot to wrangle off his Bridge when they finally came around. Too bad for them; their chance to exit the airlock while they were still on the ground had come to a close. The tiny, wounded female would sort herself out, if she could figure out how to get off the vessel at all...she was no threat to him, even if she was still stuck inside once they were in orbit.

Turning on a heel, the Commander drew a deep breath and held it before slowly, forcefully exhaling, willing the colour back into his vision as his heart pounded in his ears. As brilliant as the Rage was in the heat of battle, it was of utterly no use when trying to pilot; at least, as it began to relinquish his grasp on him, it had finally cleared the fog from his mind and brought his full consciousness to the fore.

With that clarity came time, and the time they'd spent immediately before the Code Red announcement; there had been a mission at hand, and he had a sneaking suspicion things had continued to get further out of hand after they'd retreated to their stasis units. Reaching over the Captain's exceptionally dusty console, he mused that thought as he initiated the central navigation array.

The Rage's effect on his vision continued to pulse back and forth as he stepped over the unconscious intruders bleeding all over his Bridge, briefly remaining the desaturated indigo of its heat as he ascended the ladder, and finally settling on something akin to sanity as he unfurled into the seat. The helmet descending over his head brought with it confort in its familiarity, and the Rage quickly retreated to a mere dot.

The ship's short-range sensors took an unusually long moment to come online, seemingly struggling briefly before plinking to life; propulsion, thankfully, was far more obedient and hummed into action without complaint.

Just what was the state of affairs out there? Surely the chaos couldn't have been too extreme, given their uninvited guests; there was no way it could be Rabizu if those tiny Utukka people had staggered in here with no armour and only one weapon between them. Following protocol, he set comms to ping the station for a status update while he fired up long-range sensors, impatiently awaiting feedback from either system.

Silence from the short range sensors. No interstellar activity within half a parsec, no movement in Hyperdrive, just the idle of nearby machinery. Strange.

Silence from comms, apart from the same, repeating Code Red that had been announced earlier. Strange, indeed.

Another brief but significant twitch of heat pulsed through his gut as the Rage refused to be entirely quelled; drawing and holding another slow, deep breath, he sought to drown it once more. It's usefulness had since expired, and while the plain, vanilla sensation of normal rage rarely got in the way, the real deal made it almost impossible to focus on anything other than wanton destruction. Right now, he instead needed answers.

Long range sensors were about as useful as everything else presently was; no interstellar activity, and nothing coming through comms on the secretive, classified frequencies that Special Ops most often used. Heck, there was nothing at all. Perhaps the station had initiated a blanket lock-out?

If that was the case, he knew he'd never get orders from the station until Special Ops had cleared the place. It finally registered, far later than it should have, that he was on a mission to eliminate the Utukka species for the exact reasons that they'd displayed to him...and yet, here they were, raiding the place.

Another pulse of rage unsettled his insides. There was nothing for it – he ought to get the ship into orbit, awaken the rest of the crew, and get the job over with so they could investigate that the Hell had happened on this wretched base.

And if his own reanimation had set the tone, the crew were going to need either medical attention, puke buckets, or a combination of both.

Triggering the hangar doors from his console, he set about powering up atmospheric thrusters as he pinged the station one last time with his intentions. When no response was forthcoming, he steadied himself against his chair and proceeded with his plan; with rehearsed calm he eased the ship out of the dusty, groaning door above and set about exiting station airspace.

Just why was there so much crap falling from the hangar door? Had the storm really belched that much debris across the valley? Surely not.

As the Juggernaut ascended, he found he was more pleased than he ought to have been in leaving this wretched moon behind.

An alarm pierced the rumble of the engines and the clatter of bulkheads; orange and angry, the bottom right of his display was repetitively flashing a familiar warning: incoming.

That machinery he'd detected earlier was, so it appeared, a vessel. Smaller than the Juggernaut and vastly more frail, it was so primitive that its propulsion system hadn't even registered as such on sensors! And yet here it was, lumbering awkwardly after him in a feat that defied logic.

Fingers flew over the console as he ran a quick scan over the vessel. Its construction was weaker than he'd thought – just how was it airborne? – and it was unarmed. Nothing registered as weapons at all, despite its complete lack of shielding allowing the scan to penetrate every inch of it. There were no shields, no armour, no significant reinforcement. It was little more than a civilian ship.

It posed no threat. If it followed him into hyperdrive, he would rip it to atoms.

As he focused on setting course for that distant G-type star, the blinking orange alert had rapidly brightened to red. The klaxon was almost deafening and, as the cold of panic descended his limbs, his fingers darted about the helm. The thing tailing him had inexplicably fired its interstellar propulsion, closing the gap between them with indescribable pace. No amount of evasive manoeuvres would counter it in time, and the ship was incapable of adequately accelerating away with so little warning, but damnit he would try.

It was all he could do to merely grit his teeth as the universe around him became nothing but noise, violence, and light.

The force of the impact had thrown him back into his chair, knocking the wind from his lungs as artificial gravity failed to counter the new, cataclysmic increase in momentum. The console above him had similarly failed but in far more violent form, its subsequent explosion briefly putting an end to the onslaught of sheer noise. As its heat ripped through his helmet and fractured the armour surrounding him, he heard nothing but static, and, as the helmet yielded to the flames, the world faded to black.

The first thing he was aware of when he came to was persistent, all-encompassing ringing in his ears. As though needles being driven into his skull, the static was downright painful.

Clencing his fists and squeezing his eyes closed, the next thing he became aware of was that his face was pressed against the cold of the deck; as he strained against the knobbled surface, forcing himself to his knees, his head protested with spinning, throbbing agony. With a strangled grunt he collapsed back against the deck, forehead meeting metal with a thunk.

The third thing he was aware of was just how much his face hurt. Last he remembered, the navigation array had deployed its helmet and armour. His face shouldn't be aching like this, it should have remained safely enclosed in the helmet.

Squinting through the smoky haze, he quickly spotted it. Or, rather, the remains of it, shattered in several significant pieces over the deck below the navigation array. Beside it lay the majority of his armour, separated into multiple components and scattered between the array and his present position, splattered pathetically across the floor. How the Hell had this come to be?

A pained groan escaped him as he rolled onto his back, blinking away dust and ash as he stared at the navigation array above; the console itself had been reduced to a mass of ripped wires and torn conduits, sparking angrily from what remained of it. A quick survey of the Bridge as he sat up revealed the rest had not fared much better, broken bulkheads and smashed consoles fizzling angrily in the wake of whatever the fuck had just befallen the ship.

Last he recalled, there had been a pursuit alarm; the pirate ship had tailed him on ascent, struggling to match pace with the far more technologically advanced–

No, he corrected himself, staggering toward the Captain's console, last thing you saw was an impactalarm, idiot.

What remained of the sensors reported the ship had come to rest on the ground. Wincing as he sunk into the Captain's chair, his fingers flew about the console in search of more data. Were there more ships? Was there another raft of intruders waiting to breech their defenses now that there were none, now that they were sitting ducks? Was this the plan all along? Surely not.

He'd clearly been wrong about the nature of that primitive ship, hadn't he?

Nothing matching the schematics of the pirate vessel was anywhere to be found. There was nothing but heat spots peppered across the landscape and unburnt fuel staining the atmosphere. He was beginning to distrust these sensors; so far, the constant negatives had done nothing to help, had they? He was so, so tired of nasty surprises. Forcing another, deeper scan, he awaited something, anything of use.

Not that anything was going to be useful in the wake of a crippled ship, was it?

A faint blip pierced the air. The deep scan had pinged a tiny energy source on the surface. Leaving nothing to chance, he hastily zeroed in on the source and magnified it as much as the crippled, flickering sensors would allow.

The energy source was, it seemed, a small craft of a similarly prehistoric design to the pirate vessel that had disabled the Juggernaut. They must have jettisoned it during the collision – there was no way such a small craft could have sustained all five of the intruders. It was little more than a shuttle.

A flicker of movement just beyond the craft caught his eye. Normally he would simply dismiss such an insignificant anomaly, but the day had already set the tone; pushing the sensors to their limits, he focused on the slow, plodding ripple.

After a moment the circling, wobbling haze quickly coalesced into a roughly bipedal figure; a moment longer, and it found a disturbingly familiar form. Drawing a breath, he squinted long and hard as subsequent scans formed a clearer and clearer image. There was no doubt about it – this was the lone female he had allowed to escape, running across the Syurga landscape toward the tiny vessel.

Gnawing at the pit of his stomach, righteous anger was quickly replaced by a resurgeance of Rage. She had done this!

Just how many things he'd been wrong about of late were a cause for embarrassment that he'd likely be marinating in for a significant period of time after all this was over. Heck, at this rate, he wouldn't be surprised if he saw a demotion for his lack of foresight and...and…

Arrogance, wasn't it?

There had been significant oversights, but perhaps the most critical of which was the assumption that an injured, child-sized woman from an undeveloped cave-man race posed no threat. She had instigated all this, that was without doubt...and as long as she was still standing, who knew what else she was capable of.

The figure painted in orbs of light had briefly paused by the stern of the vessel, doubled over in what appeared to be agony, before desperately scrambling up onto the platform and rattling at the door. The Rage, knotting at his insides, clawing at his chest, burst free once more and enveloped his being, searing through his veins. In that moment, nothing hurt. Not his head, not his face, not the shoulder he'd seemingly landed on, not the slowly healing gunshot wound in his chest. There was only one thought: neutralise the threat.

"Bitch. You'll get yours."

A/N: HOLY CRAP, HE LIVES.

Good Lord, this was not the sort of hiatus I intended. Long story short, I am shit at managing my life like a grown adult and the wild oscillations between way too much work and 'how do I pay the rent next week' drove me into a fair amount of burnout. People like me should probably not freelance.

Of all things, what brought juice back to the creativity was yet another movie with yet another monster...I've become low-key obsessed with The Shape of Water, and instead of funnelling my creative fuckery into yet another fandom as I usually do, I'm trying to channel it into this guy. Lucky for you all!

This chapter is a little rough around the edges, possibly a little too rough for my liking, but I'm THAT rusty after months of simply keeping my head above water. It'll likely get a revisit, just like TWFF will soon enough.

Speaking of which...looks like we're cliffing right where TWFF picks up. How about that.

(PS: FF readers, I am so, so sorry I can't actually respond to your kind messages. I can on AO3 or DA or WattPad! But I love you all regardless, no matter where you read.)