Despair is an ugly thing. A lot of people think it’s a form of pain but really they’re not the same at all. A person can live with pain for decades and it’s still possible for them to flourish. People have accomplished amazing things through tortuous agony. Hell, in some ways, pain is a friend to humans. At least when you’re in pain, you know that you’re still alive.

Despair is something different entirely. Despair is a monster you can’t outrun. It’s a demon you can’t banish. It is an ugly, flat, unclimbable wall.

Pain lets us know we’re alive. Despair tells us we’re dying.

I sat in the snow as the light faded all around me. Snow fell all around me, piled up on my shoulders and head. It didn’t matter. Nothing did. I couldn’t save Ai.

The suit ran diagnostics while I knelt there. Somewhere in all the falls and drops and collisions things had gotten pretty banged up. There were cracks in the suit that were going to kill me. So even if there was a way for me to get to Ai, it wouldn’t matter. I’d freeze to death long before I got there.

A notification popped up in my HUD. I ignored it at first, but the little pulsing motion in front of my eyes was annoying. I opened it and found that the suit had finished charging the data pad I’d picked up. My first thought was, What data pad? And then I remembered that I’d picked it up back in the cave. It must have been slowly sapping energy from my suit to charge itself. Great. Not like I’d need that energy to keep warm anymore.

I reached back and the suit slid the data pad into my hand. It popped up with a timecode on the front that meant essentially nothing here on Persephone, but the background caught my eye. And I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

The background of the picture was pure white. Most of the middle of the picture was dominated by a man in all black with a gun in a shoulder -holster, leaning on the outer frame of the picture. Beneath him four cars drove at one another, heading for a terrible collision. I recognized that picture. It was the poster for one of Rip’s favorite movies.

This was Rip’s data pad.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

My hand came up to my face, rubbing at my chin as I felt my breathing speed up. The old man kept a video diary on here. It had all his favorite movies stored on it. There was hardly a thing in the world that could be a better memorial of him for me to hold onto. Shame I’d only be able to memorialize him for a couple hours. But then again, the way everything else I touched went, maybe that was for the best.

I touched the screen and the image slid away to reveal a series of applications with another ancient movie poster behind them, this one had a neon yellow background with a man looking off in the distance. Rip had only ever used the pad for a fraction of its potential uses. Finding his diary wasn’t hard. I’d been afraid that it would be hidden behind some sort of lock but it wasn’t. That made a strange kind of sense. Rip had always been a very open person.

I was greeted by a wall of nearly identical thumbnails, all showing Rip’s face. I’d cried a lot already but I felt my eyes trying to produce more at the sight of that craggy old face. Not being able to wipe your own eyes is awful.

I tabbed through the different videos. Rip talked about his day in a lot of them and talked about whatever new movie he’d watched in every single one. I’d expected that.

But there was something else he talked about in almost every video.

Me.

At the end of basically every single video I could find he talked about me, about what I had done that day, how I’d made him laugh. He talked about things I’d fixed without being asked. He talked about the movies we watched together. He talked about the things he hoped for me and about what he saw in me.

I told you I’ve been hurt a lot in my life. The past week had been one of the most pain-filled I’d ever experienced. The last hours were, without a doubt, the worst of my entire life. But nothing hurt like hearing Rip talk about how proud he was of me.

In the last video he ever recorded he talked about the fight we had that day. He wasn’t mad. He said,

That boy is too damn headstrong for his own good. I wish I could take the weight off his shoulders. He thinks he’s a failure. He thinks he’s worthless. And I guess, coming out from living surrounded by trash, that’s understandable. But he’s killing himself, shutting off his own air. If he stopped cutting himself down for five minutes, stopped listening to the idiots around him who don’t see past his own self-deprecation… He’s smart, hardworking. And of course he screws up. Who the hell doesn’t? Until he can see past the mistakes and see how far he’s come, he’ll stay the same scared little boy I met. But that’s not who he is. I can already see it in him. If the man I see wasn’t inside him, struggling to push free, he wouldn’t be so hard on himself. One day he’ll get that. And I pity the poor bastard who gets in his way when he does. My boy will punch right through him.

My boy, he said. He always called me son when we talked. I never knew he’d meant it.