“-One more time!”

Atte stumbles away and places one hand on Typhin’s chair, taking a deep breath. “N-, no, I think I’d rather not.”

“Why not? Isn’t it fun being in the air? I bet it feels like a neato carnival ride!”

He holds up one finger. “The first time, it felt like fun. Past that? No.” I look at him, consciously trying to form my face into that of a sad puppy-dog. “D-, don’t look at me like that, man! It’s not that I don’t want to help you get better at this, it’s just that being man-handled by a bunch of tentacles is a bit…” I poke out my lower lip. A perfect pout. He frowns and runs one hand through his hair. “Okay,” he sighs, “fine. Alright. Sure. O-, one more time. But if you hold me too tight, then-,”

“Alright!! Thanks, Atte!” I grin and take a pose, holding out my hands, palms exposed and ready. “Come at me!”

He shakes his head, but nonetheless hunches down, placing his feet at just the right angle to be able to take off at a moment’s notice. For a second, we lock eye-contact. And then, he springs at me, and my man-catchers swoop out from my hands, but a deft dodge from Atte makes both of them miss as he slips by, getting almost close enough to touch me before the man-catchers sweep around to first knock him off his feet and then catch him in the air, running around his midsection like a pair of thick belts. For a second, he hands in the air, arms dangling. “...Can you let me down now?”

“Y-, yessir!” I say and quickly put him down, making sure he gets back on his feet properly.

He breathes a sigh and dusts off his knees. “Didn’t I tell you not to call me sir? Ah, then again, with the Commander, I guess you’ve got it hard-wired by now…”

Yeah, he’s right about that. By this point, I think calling people ‘sir’ might just be my standard greeting. Personally, I consider this a positive, since it means I probably won’t find myself in any situation where I refer to someone wrongly. Man, just imagine if I act all friendly with someone and they punish me for it… I’d be very sad! Most of all, I don’t wanna disappoint Typhin. If he gets in trouble because of me, that’d be even worse!

I smile sheepishly. “Yeah, pretty much.” Something heavy shifts in my pocket and I look down at the little indent of the stun blaster. The weight still doesn’t feel quite right, but I’ll probably get used to it. Someday. Maybe.

Atte follows my trail of sight and crosses his arms. “If you’re serious about learning how to use that thing, I’d suggest keeping it in your inner pocket. As it is now, anybody who’d bother to think will know you’re packing.”

“Oh, uh,” I fumble the blaster out of my pocket and slip it inside my jacket, “like that?” It still makes a small bulge, but I can’t think of any other place to put it.

He must be thinking something similar, because he purses his lips and rubs his chin. “Something like that.” He looks back at the closed door before turning back to me and holding out his hand. I stare at it for a second or two. “Could you…?”

“Ah! Uh, sorry.” I grab the stun blaster from inside my pocket and put it in his hand. “Here you go!”

“Thanks,” he says and retracts his hand, weighing the weapon in it before taking an experimental grip and pointing it at me. To say my smile is turning strained might be a bit of an understatement, and he must have noticed this, because he hastily turns it elsewhere. “It’s not a bad blaster. A bit light, probably won’t stun anything too big, but it’ll keep you safe against most species.” He hands it back to me. I’m not really sure what to do with it, but I feel kind of silly, like a kid with a glock. He grips my hands around the hilt, “Here, hold it like this…”

I nod absently, trying to follow his directions as best as I can.

“There. Your fingers are a bit thick, but it shouldn’t be a problem.” They aren’t technically fingers, but I don’t think I should tell him that, so I keep quiet. “If you press the switch, it’ll fire. But don’t fire right now, or you’ll hit me, and I seriously don’t want to be stunned. It was bad enough in the academy, and besides, hitting the Commander's room might get you a night in the slammer.”

I turn the gun away from anything valuable in the room. In other words, I point it at my smaller body. “So, uh, how do I put on the safety?...”

“That would be this little switch he-,”

A twitch of the finger.

WEEEEOOO!

A sound I can confidently declare as being the strangest I have heard yet meets my ears as a weird blue circle erupts from the nozzle of the stun blaster, cranes through the air slightly slower than should be expected, and hits my smaller body, making it explode like a grape in a microwave. I blink at the sight. I’m less surprised that it happened and more that it didn’t hurt at all. Like, I saw it hit, but it doesn’t even feel like it hit me at all.

I feel a weight grow onto the end of my tail, and just to prove that I did indeed just pop myself, there’s my little body.

“That is… Not how bodies usually react to a stun shot,” Atte says quietly.

“Yeah, uh, my body doesn’t really react all that typically to things, so I’m honestly not too surprised.” Absently, I focus a little on my smaller body, making it disconnect from the rest of me and wander over to where it previously exploded. There’s flesh and stuff spread in a perfect circle from where it got hit, and I can’t imagine making anyone else clean it up, so even though it hurts my heart, I force my small body to grit its teeth and slurp up the remains.

…Now that I think about it, outside this context, eating your own dead body might be a little weird, right? B-, but it’s not like it’s really all that strange, so I think it’s okay. Yeah.

Atte makes a face like he has a lot to say but knows he won’t get a good answer. He turns to me and points to a little switch on the body of the blaster. “That switch over there. That’s the safety. I, uh, recommend you flip it.”

I nod at him and flick the safety on. With that done, there wasn’t really all that much left for us to do. Obviously, I made him swear an oath not to tell Typhin I exploded, but beyond that, there was nothing else truly dire to handle. I kind of sort of need to learn how to actually shoot right with this - hitting myself spot-on had been a fluke at best - but that could wait.

Apparently, I had been out in space (spacing out, ha-ha) for quite a while, because night was about to fall, metaphorically speaking. I followed Atte to the cafeteria, ate dinner, and then off to bed.

And here we are, the four of us. I furrow my brows. Four?...

I look over at 26 where he sits on his bunk bed. He still hasn’t taken off his armour, which is a bit unusual. Charge and Atte are both here, so… “Uh, Twenty-six? Where is-,”

Even from behind the black eyes of his helmet, I can tell he shoots me a glare. His silence tells me everything I need to know and all the optimism I had diligently required over the past few hours drains away to leave me cold and trembling. Turning away from me, 26 hurries through undressing and getting to bed, lying with his back to the rest of us.

I… don’t know what to say. I don’t think there is anything I can say.

I’ve been lucky all my life, haven’t lost too many loved ones, haven’t lost myself too badly. I’ve had it good. I think, if I were to try to comfort him, I’d only come across as condescending. Maybe that’s what I’d be, too. I don’t have any right to say anything to him.

…But it feels bad to leave him to stew, too. He’s sad. He needs someone to tell him that it’ll be alright, but more than that, he needs that someone to be the kind of person he can trust to mean it.

Someone sits down next to me and a large, heavy hand falls on my back. I turn to look at Charge. He’s taken off his helmet now, and he looks just like he did before. Old. He’s fought and trained ever since he was born. It’s why he was born. Most people grapple with not having a purpose in life. I wonder if he grapples with the purpose that he does have. How many of his brothers has he lost? I couldn’t find any numbers on how many clones were killed, but casualties are a fact of war.

“He had accepted this when he joined this war,” Charge says gravely. “Dying is part of the job. You sell yourself, body and soul.”

I understand that, but shouldn’t he also have someone to return to? Someone to fight alongside? Right now, he has no one. “But he’s hurting,” I mutter. “There must be something we can do. Something we can say.”

“There isn’t,” Charge states simply. His eyes shine with truth and recognition. He speaks with tried-and-true confidence when he says, “Only he can bring himself back to the light. We cannot force him to get over it, even less than we can bring back his brother.”

I frown to myself. And maybe he’s right. Maybe there isn’t anything we can do but wait for him to get better on his own, but by that point, he’ll already have gone through enough pain for a lifetime.

I don’t want anyone to experience that.

The lights go out, everyone slips into bed, and I can’t sleep. Even when everything is dark and everyone is asleep, I remain awake. Eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. But I’m not alone. I hear them wake up even before their eyes open. For the past few minutes, their heart had been steadily increasing in tempo, right until they woke up, sitting up in bed, breathing heavily.

Without saying anything, they sip out of bed. I watch them as they open the door and stumble out into the hallway. Maybe I should just let them go. There’s nothing I can tell them.

And still, I hop out of bed, pulling on a shirt if only for modesty.

The hallway outside is bright and white and makes me feel temporally displaced, but I power through and walk down it anyways, following the leaving footsteps.

I don’t have to follow them for long before they stop and enter a little room I hadn’t noticed before. The door pulls closed behind them, but with my minor clearance, I’m able to follow inside. The room is dark, but it isn’t entirely black. Disregarding the blinking lights and the dim monitors, most of the light is coming from a large transparent window mounted on the floor. Out there, among all the blackness, countless stars can be sighted. In the middle of the window is a seat connected to a large turret of some sort.

On that seat, I see 26, clutching a slightly charred helmet to his chest.

His eyes meet mine and in the light of the stars, I can see something on his cheek shimmer and run down it, dropping onto the window like a pearl.

“...Mort?”