The room was completely silent.
I was shaking. My whole body was shaking. The tear on my cheek had dried, and I hadn't noticed when.
He opened his one working eye and looked up at me.
"Finish it," he said.
His voice was wrecked. Quiet. Nothing like the snarl from before.
"Finish it, Vaahs."
"I'm not asking you to spare me." He said it with what was left of his dignity, which was still considerable. "I'm asking you to finish it. Don't make me wait for it. Don't—" He stopped. "Don't make it small."
I understood what he was asking.
He didn't want to bleed out on the floor. He wanted it to mean something, even here, even in this stupid stone room with its high windows and its gold light. He wanted it fast. The merciful version. The one that costs the person giving it something.
My hand was still shaking.
I grabbed his collar and pulled him up slightly and looked at him one more time.
He looked back.
I know, it said. I know, I know, I know. I've always known. I just didn't have the language for it, and now it's too late, and that's not your fault, and it is your fault and I'm not going to say any of that out loud because I am a Viltrumite and I am your brother and this is the only way I know how to love you, you stupid, soft, impossible—
"I'm sorry," I said. I pulled back my fist, still shaking.
He closed his eye.
"Yeah, I know, I know..." he said quietly. "Me too."
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH—!"
-------------
[3rd POV]
He jolted awake, blowing a massive hole in the cage he was in with his head. The bright orange barriers cracked and crumbled under the pressure before bursting into orange light.
"Why'd I dream of that now...?" he muttered under his breath, looking around.
The air was different. It felt more abandoned. Isolated. He looked at the camera, waving for a second. No response.
Have they abandoned him? No, then it would be more like got "rid" of him.
He got up, inspecting his body closer for the first time. He flexed his fingers again, jumped up once, and breathed out.
Within a split second, he was already at the cockpit. Technology got a lot more advanced... huh?
He looked outside the viewport. These people were docked here... at this random planet in god knows what galaxy. It wasn't a single race inhabiting this planet; there were variations. Perhaps a kind of hub for like-minded people...
He should go out and gather some information first. Times have changed. He's not even in his familiar galaxy. But the problem lies in fact that he has no clothes.
Eh... whatever. I'll just borrow it from someone. Where is the button to open the door? God, this has gotten complex.
He found it eventually, by a panel near the airlock that had been redesigned twice over, by the look of it. He pressed what felt right, and the door hissed open, releasing a gust of warm, recycled air that smelled like a dozen different biologies.
He stepped out barefoot onto the dock.
The station — if you could call it that, it was more like a planet that had given up being a planet and decided to become a place instead — stretched out in every direction. Structures built into structures built into the bones of something.
Nobody looked at him immediately. That was interesting. Either they had a high threshold for unusual, or he wasn't as conspicuous as he thought.
Then a child — some bipedal thing with too many fingers and enormous amber eyes stopped walking and stared at him with open, uncomplicated awe.
Okay, contradiction. I'm conspicuous.
He kept moving.
The crowd thickened near what looked like a market. Stalls, noise, the universal smell of food being cooked in fat. He scanned the stalls without slowing down. Clothes first. Then food. Then, information, or maybe information while eating, if he could find someone who talked while they chewed.
He spotted a rack of clothing outside a stall run by a being approximately three times as wide as it was tall, with a flat, horizontal face and eyes on the sides of its head. The rack was unsupervised for exactly the amount of time he needed.
He grabbed something in a dark color that looked like it would fit in a blur and flew off to somewhere remote. He skid across the floor, coming to a smooth landing.
It was an alley, grimy waste, and weird creatures. He slid into his clothes quite easily; they were actually just a little bit oversized. "This is... comfortable clothing. What is this place?"
He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to, smoothing the fabric down with the back of his hand. It was some kind of material he didn't have a name for. It breathed. It moved with him. Whoever made it knew what a body was supposed to do.
He looked up. The sky, if you could call it that, was a layered thing. Atmosphere and superstructure braided together, light sources at three different heights casting three different shadows off every object.
Viltrumite discipline had a name for this state — the moment after disorientation, before action. The still point. His father had called it something like the gathering, though his father had made everything sound like it was being carved in stone as he said it.
He gathered.
Facts, in order:
He was alive, which was not a given.
He was uninjured, which was also not a given.
He was in a place that was not his galaxy, not his era — he didn't know by how much, but enough that the technology had shifted a generation at minimum, maybe two, maybe more.
Great.
He flew back to the market, making sure that there was no one who saw him. Anonymity is crucial. This is potential enemy territory.
He blended in with the crowd, walking at a steady pace.
He stopped at the food stall. The vendor was a small, quick-handed being with pale blue skin pulled tight over sharp angles, three-fingered hands moving constantly.
"What's good," he said.
The vendor looked him up and down. "You got currency?"
"Not yet."
"Then nothing's good."
...
The hard way, then.
"I don't think you understand the scope of the situation. You're not in a position to be talking back to me." Voss said, dead in the eye, devoid of any emotion.
And somehow, the shopkeeper understood that this one was not worth it.
The vendor made a sound under his breath. Then reached under the counter and held out something on a skewer.
He took the skewer. Looked at it. Bit into it.
It was good. It was actually, genuinely good, which surprised him more than almost anything else today.
The vendor muttered something that loosely translated to cursed morning and went back to tending his grill.
Voss ate and watched the crowd.
It was a useful thing, watching. People forgot to watch. They moved through the world with their eyes at head height, catching what was in front of them, missing everything else. He'd had that habit trained out of him so long ago he couldn't remember having it.
He finished the skewer.
"Who runs this place," he said. Not a question, exactly.
The vendor didn't look up. "Veth runs itself. That's the official answer."
"And the unofficial one."
A pause. The three-fingered hands kept moving. "Three families, roughly. They don't call themselves that, but that's what they are. They don't fight each other because fighting is bad for commerce. They don't cooperate either, because cooperation means sharing." A brief, humorless sound. "So they orbit each other. Careful-like."
Voss set the skewer stick on the counter.
"Enforcement?"
"Their own, and a neutral guild that everyone pays into and nobody fully trusts. The guild keeps the docks from becoming a massacre." A glance up, finally. Quick. Assessing. "You're not looking for work."
It wasn't a question either.
"No," Voss agreed.
"Then what are you looking for?"
"That's a good question... what's your name?"
The guy said something in another language.
...
"Hm, fuck that. Let's call you Karl. Karl, let me fill you in on a secret. I've been dead a long time, Karl. A long time." I pulled him in closer. "And I'm just... looking for purpose. Y'know. Purpose. This is not even my world, at least how I remember it," he explained. "So, what am I looking for, Karl? I don't FUCKING know."
Karl looked at him.
Voss looked back.
Then Karl reached under the counter a third time. He seemed to keep a lot of things under there. He produced a small, flat bottle of something and set it between them without comment.
Voss looked at it.
"That bad?" he said.
"You just told me you've been dead a long time and you don't know what you're looking for." Karl poured two small cups without being asked. "Yes. That's bad."
Voss picked up the cup. Smelled it. Something fermented, something sharp, something that might have no effect on him whatsoever, which would be its own kind of disappointing.
He drank it anyway.
"I'm not looking for sympathy," he said, setting the cup down.
"I know. You're not the type." Karl drank his own. "You're the type that says the true thing out loud once, to a stranger, because strangers are safe, and then never says it again."
Voss said nothing.
Which was, itself, a kind of answer.
"Purpose," Karl said, like he was turning the word over, checking it for damage. "That's a hard thing to look for from scratch."
"I'm aware."
"Usually, people come here looking for credits. Or safety. Or someone they lost." A pause. "Purpose is rarer. Harder to sell and harder to find."
"I'm not asking you to sell it to me."
"No, you're asking me what I think, and I think-" Karl stopped. Looked at him sideways, with the specific caution of someone who has learned that honesty has a variable price depending on who you're honest with. "I think you already have it. You just lost the thing it was attached to."
Voss went still.
"Now what the fuck does that mean, Karl?