Wandering the grey lunar halls like some malevolent spirit, shaking from exhaustion and hunger, a coldness settling into his bones that ached. Sleep, he needed sleep. Food, he needed food.

Angry. Tired. Hungry. So hungry.

He’d fought to ignore it all when they ran from the morgue but now that the urgency of it all had faded, the reality of his condition hit him like a railgun round. It almost felt like he’d died again. Or rather that he’d been knocked into some plane of existence that was removed from this one and he was watching everything through a hazy screen. On some level, he knew he was alive, but everything his body did ran on instinct and the need to assuage the hunger before it destroyed him.

What little that still felt conscious in Sirius remembered leaving the benches. He remembered that somewhere, down some forgotten, condemned hallway, there was a room for him and a key in his pocket, but as he could eat neither, they were meaningless to him.

A blur of faces, some welcoming, some horrified, some angry and hostile. He ate, the tastes of things both good, passable, and utterly disgusting cutting through the mental fog. Every scent assaulted him with a new wave of hunger, even as he vomited out the excess he had consumed. There was pain, he remembered being hit and struck by people who didn’t understand he was just hungry. He just needed to eat.

Eventually, his exhaustion eclipsed his hunger and Sirius slunk back to the only safe place he knew, the room to which the key belonged, and passed out, too tired to even dream.

-X-

When Sirius woke up, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been out. The last time he’d been unconscious had cost him 70 years, and a small part of him feared it would happen again. He felt feverish, simultaneously too cold and too hot and his mouth was drier than sandpaper. A pounding headache and a stomach that felt moments away from rebelling. It was the worst hangover of his life, but he couldn’t remember drinking. The awful, familiar smells of sweat and stomach acid were absolutely assaulting.

He glanced around the room, taking in the surroundings. From the bed, which was tucked out of the way in a corner, he could see the rest of the small space was dwarfed by a comfy chair and a table. There were two doors, one which he imagined led out to the hallway, and the other to a bathroom? What sort of expensive place was this that had individual bathrooms? None of it looked familiar. Couldn’t even remember how he got there.

You walked here, Orion reminded, his ‘voice’ cutting through the headache, “Our scientist friend got us a room, she’s staying next door”. The alien appeared seated in the chair, still looking exactly like Dima but wearing a far haughtier expression than Sirius had seen on the man in life.

Sirius furrowed his brow, trying to remember what had happened before waking up here, but only vague memories surfaced. The clearest memory was the scientist, Dr. Khorana, first yelling at him and then promising him revenge. Everything after that was fuzzy.

“How do you remember it but not me?”

“Well, owing to a more efficient storage matrix my memories don’t degrade as fast as yours. Add the fact that I was still reconstructing the rest of your neural matter up until a few hours ago, you’re unlikely to remember much since the gunshot. Does that explain it well enough for you?” His voice was almost prideful, almost contemptuous.

“But I remember the morgue and running. Why can’t I remember what happened after?”

“Simple matter of running out of mass and energy to work with. Simply wasn’t enough material to build pathways at that point. It’s been, well, frankly millennia upon millennia since I’ve had to reconstruct this sort of matter. The work is rather delicate. How to explain…”, Orion glanced down thoughtfully, “Here’s the important thing: you’ll get your memories back. It’s just going to take a little time as your brain rebuilds all those connections”.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“How long? Are we talking hours? Days? Years?”

“I’m not sure. You’ll probably have the bulk back before long. As far as all of them, it might be impossible. Even for us, memory can be a fickle thing. Has to do with the whole delicate business of consciousness”.

I haven’t lost anything else, have I? I remember the Anna, that station. Dima… Sirius’ heart sank as he remembered how his former enemy turned ally had died like a dog in the street. And now an alien was wearing his face, but only that, reducing the man down to nothing but a paper mask for some unknowably formless thing.

“I can change who I look like”, Orion offered, and Sirius resented how his thoughts were no longer only his own, “This appearance seems to cause you much conflict. I can try another”.

“Again. I’ve told you before, and you’d know it from sneaking around in my head that there isn’t anyone that would make this better”.

“So, you’ve made up your mind then”, Orion confirmed, “I will remain wearing the face of the dead”.

“The face of a friend”, Sirius corrected though the word felt strange as he said it, like he hadn’t really meant it.

He stood and a flash of somebody yelling at him in a language he didn’t understand hit him so vividly, it was like they were in the room with him. He steadied himself against the wall, fighting to stay in the now and not the then. Yesterday had been bad, he couldn’t remember why save for a strong sense of unease. “What happened yesterday?”

Orion only flickered out of sight in response.

Seconds later, Sirius heard a light knock on the door. He answered it to find Dr. Khorana standing in the hall, her long dark hair tied into a braid and an anxious expression on her round face. She looked tired, like she’d been unable to sleep for a few days but scrutinized his face with a sharp clarity.

“Are you alright?” she asked gently, “You were really out of it last night”.

“Last night? That was last night?”

“Do you remember what happened? You were really sick. I’ve never seen anything like it”, she glanced around the hallway as if to spot anyone watching them, “Look, let’s talk about it inside the room”.

Sirius considered shutting the door but instead he stepped back, letting her pass. She was carrying a pair of duffel bags that she dropped onto the table and then settled into the chair next to it. She sighed then wrinkled her nose.

“You need a shower. Bad. Smells like someone died in here”, she commented.

Sirius shrugged, “Haven’t been awake long enough to get to that. What’s in those?” he nodded at the bags.

“I went shopping. Had to buy myself a new comm, then I realized our ‘friend’ wasn’t kind enough to pack us all suitcases before zapping us to the moon, so I’ve taken care of that as well”, she pushed one bag forward, “Here, this one’s yours. I had to guess at sizes but at least everything is clean and legitimately paid for”. She glared at a section of wall, where he saw an old fake-leather aviator jacket hanging from a peg. Sirius could only wonder who he’d stolen it from.

“Thanks”. Sirius said as he took the bag and set it on the bed and sat down next to it, “So, what happened? I don’t remember being sick”. As he said it, he was hit by another vivid memory of vomiting in a public restroom, “Well, okay, I remember a little bit now”.

“Look, you got the clothes and you seem well enough to stand, so I don’t see why you can’t just shower, and I tell what happened to you after because I feel like I’m going to catch something by just breathing the air in here. I wouldn’t normally be this forward, but you’re literally covered in sick right now”.

Sirius glanced down, and sure enough, she was right. He grabbed the bag and went into the bathroom, but not before giving an irritated huff to let her know he was going under protest.

His attitude changed when he saw how nice the bathroom was.

There were all the bare minimums, a sink, toilet, and some shelves, but Sirius only had eyes for the shower. A full-size shower, all for him.

He spent enough water that the water ration system beeped at him angrily, but he ignored it. Scrubbing off the days grime and sickness, washing the traces of the past off of him felt deeply cathartic. It made him feel like a person again.

Drying off, Sirius took a moment to look in the mirror and he regretted it. Did he really look that bad? No wonder everyone had been staring at him like he was some sort of ticking time bomb.

It seemed to him that he had aged so much since the last time he saw his own face. It had been a few years since there had been both time and means to look at himself properly. The Anna’s financial management had decided to save money by not buying frivolous things such as mirrors or up-to-spec air recyclers. And most days he was in too much of a rush to do anything more than the bare minimum.

His rust-brown hair had grown out by a few centimeters. Sirius normally kept it shaved all the way down since it was easier to care for, but he found himself liking the longer look. He took the electric trimmer to the lower half of his face but decided against going completely clean-shaven. But the biggest and most astounding change was his eyes, their original color was more like a blue-grey if he remembered right, but now they reminded him more of the color of the glowing vines on the Henge, a sort of purplish-violet color. What other changes happened to me that I can’t see?