"Where am I? Is this how death feels? Is this the end?"
He looks around and sees nothing, only darkness. No light, no sound, nobody around.
He tries to walk.
With each footstep he goes deeper and deeper into the darkness, gets surrounded by it.
He walks faster, starts to run even. The dark place he seems to be in is endless.
As he keeps running further, suddenly he is thrown back into past battles. He can feel them, lives them once again
with all it's pain, anger, stress and violence. He hears the shots hitting and burning through his ships hull,
reaching further and further into it's guts.
He feels them burning his skin as they reach the inside of the cockpit. Going through his body.
He witnesses once more his wingmen getting shot down one by one.
Sees how their ships get ripped open by enemy fire as they were mere tin cans.
"No!!! Not this again!!! I've seen it!!! I've seen enough of this!!! Why do I have to see this???"
He runs further into the darkness as the pictures fade.
Suddenly he finds himself in a familiar ships interior. It's the carrier where he grew up.
He can hear shots, screams. He runs across the corridors to reach the location they come from.
As he reaches the shot sounds origin, he sees his mother, holding a child, holding his younger self.
She hides him inside a locker.
"Don't go out, no matter what happens, you understand?
I will come to get you once it's all finished!"
Then, she runs off as the enemy soldiers board the Zephyr, leaving the young, innocent and crying James inside the sheltering locker.
"Mom!! Don't run away!!! You won't make it!!!
Don't leave me alone inside this steely thing!!! Stay with me!!! Hide yourself too!!! Mom!!!"
He tries in vain to warn her, to tell her that he knows how it's gonna end,
but his voice doesn't seem to reach and he can only watch her running into her already settled fate.
And as he tries to go after her, suddenly the floor goes black,
all the memories melt into a indescribable mess of abstract pictures, sounds and feelings.
He begins to feel the soil weakening, fading and he begins to fall.
Falling faster, deeper into the dark, into the nowhere.
And as the fall slows down, finally coming to a full stop,
he can hear a voice speaking to him, Somehow he only catches up small parts of it, but still recognizes a familiar voice.
"If you hear me... ---- I won't let you die...---- fight...---- Life...---"
"Who's voice is that? I can't seem to... Wait, I remember... I know this voice..."
The voice slowly fades away and footsteps can be heard going further away until disappearing as well.
"Wait! Don't go! Where...? How...? Please!!!"
Suddenly, James breathes in as deep as he can, and opens his eyes.
"Where am I? What happened...?"
He looks around, tries to find some objects that reminds him a familiar place. And he does remember.
He remembers everything.
"Wait... I remember this place... The medical unit... New Hope... The battle around Yuma..."
He sits up, Looks down at his body. All those stitches, all those wires and cables going right into his flesh.
He was badly wounded, this time more than ever.
He takes a deep breath and starts to remove the wires one by one.
Finally done with ripping out the last one, he checks the mechanical prosthetic on his broken leg
and tries to stand up. Still weakened due to his wounds and his recent near death experience.
He stumbles across the room, heading to the bathroom. As he reaches the sink,
he looks at himself into the mirror.
"Hello Mister Rascal... Damn... Pretty messed up, huh?... Like a roasted potato...
All burnt, bruised and swollen... Well... Not the first time..."
He coughs hard and spits some blood into the sink. As he looks at the blood going down the sewer,
He spits once more and raises his head again, washes his face with some cold water,
takes a sip from the tap and heads back into the room he came from.
On a shelf, he finds his belongings. His datapad, credit cards, the dogtag, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
He takes the cigarettes and his lighter, heads to the only window in the dimmed room,
opens it, and as he thoughtfully looks up into the clear nightsky, clenches his left fist,
making the burnt and molten synthetic skin crackle and burst, revealing the bland bluish titanium alloy
his cybernetic arm is made of.
"Dammit... It's never gonna end, does it?"
He lifts his left arm letting the lights from outside shine on it. And as he sits down on the windowsill,
he looks at his arm and his numerous scars, remembering a sentence, words from an ancient and maybe
long forgotten philosopher
"Whoever fights monsters better sees that, in the process, he does not become a monster himself"
Those words seem to pack more of a meaning to him as the battles go on and on.
"Is it this what he was talking about? Does the constant fighting make us less and less human?
Is this how the constant fights change people?"
And as the night deepens, He sits there, smoking his cigarettes, listening to the nearby spaceport's nocturnal
activity and stares into the dark blue sky as if he is drawn to it, to this endless, empty, but yet so hostile environment.
Waiting for the day he will be out there again, sitting aboard his Nyx, ready to fight, live, survive,
and give the people of Crayter a better place to live, grow and prosper...
