Pain and Suffering

By: Absolute Edge

Chapter I

Something was wrong. Something wasn't happening. He was dying but he didn't know why. He struggled against the crushing force, the overwhelming darkness closing in around him.

He was losing.

This isn't right! Why was nothing happening? What was he doing wrong? He had no answers to the questions that flooded his mind, so he continued to die.

"Breathe."

The voice was all around him. It was right. That was what he had forgotten. That's what the darkness was taking away from him.

He opened his mouth but it wasn't working. There was no air, only the darkness.

"Breathe!"

The voice was insistent, almost teaching. Like a mother scolding a child for something that should be obvious. It wasn't helping. He had forgotten. He just couldn't remember how.

"BREATHE!"

The voice screamed directly into his mind. His whole body twitched in pain as it echoed around his skull like a wrecking ball. He tried again and was rewarded by something that was not air. It was warm and wet, it was surprisingly soothing. It felt good.

The darkness retreated, a small victory in reality. The warm and wet was pleasant, regardless of its rather tangy metallic aftertaste. It almost tasted like copper, but that wasn't important.

The darkness came back with a vengeance. He thrashed in its vicious embrace. His limbs slowed, his efforts slackened, his strength left him. He died.

"Wake up."

He woke up gasping for air and coughing up the warm and wet, it was blood. Not that surprising now that he thought about it. He opened a bloodied and bruised eye, his left didn't respond. A burning sky stared back at him, an orange and red inferno. The sun was barely visible through the cloud cover. There were things drifting through the air. He reached out to capture one of the slow moving objects but stopped abruptly. He squinted at his hand and realized that his pinky and ring finger of his right hand had been replaced by crusty stumps at the knuckle. He found himself shocked that he didn't feel all that surprised by the physical loss. He felt the same about the fact that most of his arm was burnt to a crisp and flaked as he moved it. He brought his hand closer to examine the damage to his fingers as his sight had become gradually blurry and had started jumping in and out of clarity. Changing his focus to his inactive left eye he felt for it with his remaining fingers and was, again, unsurprised to find a wet, sticky crater instead. His fingers grazed by his brow as they followed the wreck of his face and discovered that his hair had been blasted to ash. He brushed his hand forward and watched the flakes of burnt flesh fall down in front of him. It brought his attention back to the mysterious objects in the air. He reached out again, slowly. One seemed to beeline straight for his open palm and he closed his fingers around it. He brought it close to examine it. He opened his fingers and saw the object for what it was

It was ash.

The same type of ash that flaked off his arm was floating through the sky now.

The sun wasn't being obscured by cloud cover. It was being blotted out by the ashen corpses of the uncountable millions that have died during the Reaper attack. He tried to smile as he recalled a conversation he had once had but his jaw felt dislocated and refused to function. It just hung there slack, slightly agape like a bad grin.

"Does-" He began, his own voice sounding foreign to him. It was bizarre… almost disturbing. He also found each word required tremendous effort with an inoperable jaw.

"Does honor… matter?" He whispered to the ghosts. He waited; lying in the ash of the millions dead, but there was no reply. He laughed weakly at the irony of his situation but it turned into a vicious cough.

He didn't hurt. In fact nothing hurt but he knew through experience that the pain will come now that he was conscious. He tried to lean forwards to uncover the extent of his injuries but to no avail. He did, however, hear a very distinct, very singular grinding sound when he had tried to move his torso. He had a spinal injury. The grinding was of crushed disks rubbing together. He let out a depressed sigh and looked at what he could instead. If his right arm was anything to go off of then at least eighty percent of his body is covered in third degree burns. The flesh was burnt black and cracked like a dry lake bed with rivers of dark red running between the cracks. It dawned on him that his left arm hasn't moved regardless of his requests to have it seek out injuries. He looked over at it and was actually surprised; he hadn't seen anything like it before. From the bicep down it was scorched bone being held together by strands of sinew and chunks of cooked meat.

He wasn't a man to cry over spilt milk and he liked to think his emotions were always in check. Before, a few years ago, he had simply died during reentry and that was that but this… this is unnecessary suffering. Regardless of his wishes his will to survive refuted death at every turn. He wouldn't be surprised if he shot himself in the head and woke up seconds later with a simple headache. He wanted to cry over this unfairness. Hadn't he suffered enough? Hadn't he experienced enough pain? He wanted to be with his love. To take her back to her home planet and build her that house on the beach she always wanted. Instead, the Universe, apparently, had a better idea.

"Hey, I'm going to let you live through that massive explosion you were only feet away from but, you know, I'm just going to dump you here as a complete wreck and leave you with a few minutes to live so you can reflect on how unfair I am. Have a nice day."

He would die here, alone and destroyed as a shell of his former self. His head swam and he blacked out as more depressing thoughts entered his mind. He was thankful for the distraction and welcomed it. Though, his peace didn't last too long. He woke to yelling.

"We got a live one!" A voice bellowed, it was vaguely familiar but his head was swimming and his one relatively good eye wasn't able to stay focused long enough to see a face. He could only make out the most obvious of details. The individual was large but there was something off about him, his arms seemed disproportionate to his great size. He tried to think but the pain suddenly spiked from his wounds all at once. It corrupted his mind and pierced straight through his very soul.

Coherent thought, gone.

Emotional stability, gone.

Peace of mind, gone.

There was no longer a logical thought process. Images failed to incite meaning. Entire sentences and phrases were collapsing into ruin. Letters became mystical glyphs that he could not decipher. There was a tsunami of pain that repeatedly threw itself against the waning fabric of his mind and an ocean of suffering washing away any semblance of order.

There was only Chaos.

"Stand aside, please. I must examine him." Another called out as it ran up and crouched by him. He didn't understand what the man was saying nor what was going on anymore. His world had been turned upside down and ripped to shreds.

Now there were others but his eye sight was just about gone. Only dark, fuzzy outlines of people against the inferno of the sky betrayed their existence. His hearing was slowly being consumed by a high pitched ringing. He felt them touching his body, his wounds but it had become only a vague pressure to him. His senses had stopped working; his body was shutting down, possibly for good this time.

No magical sciences to bring him back from the dead. No sudden recovery to send him back into the fray. He could feel deaths sweet kiss against his flesh and he welcomed it like the old friend that it is.

No.

He didn't want to die. He realized that he wanted to live. There were many reasons this desire to survive had come about but there was one that stood out amongst them. It pulled his will back from the crippled corner of his mind where it had been hiding. It filled his heart with purpose.

He made her a promise.

He will not die.

Not here.

Not now.