He swallowed thickly as the memories flooded back to him. “They surged past me. Rhiad was opened up from waist to throat by one of their claws, yet they simply ignored me. I thought I had let them in when I tried to close the tear, and they were thanking me somehow, or something like that. I know it sounds fucking stupid, but I didn’t know how else to explain it. They’d ripped apart the security guards before I managed to get my shit together enough to run.”

Malan sighed, rubbing at his eyes tiredly. “All I could think of was to get to my parents. To Isolde. I’d never conceived something could be so close to hell as that run through the Jauda. So many died, and all I could think was this was me. I was too late to my father—I only found him after the fact. I found my mother with a bloodied pulse rifle in hand between three of those things and Isolde. She told me to take Isolde and run, and then she died too.”

His hands were trembling now, tears stinging at his eyes without actually falling. He was no longer talking to Elena, or even at a bar. He was deep inside his own mind, narrating the nightmare that had plagued him every night for the last two years.

“Isolde was hurt. Doctors said after the fact that she’d ingested some of their blood during the fighting, on top of the damage that had been done to her legs. So I just held her and ran. Everyone who tried to help died horribly, as well as plenty who were just trying to get out back to their own families, and each time I had known that their blood was on my hands. It was all I could do to get Isolde to the escape pods and get off the station. UGC responded to the distress call quick—we were considered too valuable for anything else—but still far too late.”

Malan took several deep breaths, trying to recentre himself, to bring himself back to the present, and he managed it only with significant effort.

“On the moon, Talia told me it had been planned, just as the Sparrow had been. The rift had nothing to do with my actions. They were just after my ability. Nothing I had done cause what happened on the Jauda. But at the time? It was all I could think about. Maybe, logically, I could have reasoned out that this hadn’t been on me, but I wasn’t being logical. I’d just seen my mother and father killed. A whole station soaked in the blood and bodies of people I knew, some of which for most of my life. And all I could think that it was because of my actions.

“I couldn’t take it,” he said with a shrug. “I made sure Isolde would be taken care of, and ran somewhere I wouldn’t have to face it.”

“Somewhere you could punish yourself for your perceived crimes,” Elena said quietly.

He nodded, and shrugged helplessly. “I didn’t know how to cope with that. I don’t know how to cope with that. I believe Talia when she says it had all been planned—she thought knowing how long they’d tracked me for, and that they were behind the worst thing that had ever happened to me would break me. But that doesn’t change two years of self-inflicted penance and telling myself it had all been my fault.”

Elena nodded, and took a long drink, slamming the empty bottle to the table a little harder than necessary.

“I appreciate the explanation, Mal. I would say you were a self-centred idiot for reacting the way you did, but you were seventeen. A kid. What seventeen year old doesn’t think they’re the centre of the universe? I’ve also seen my fair share of shit since I signed up at eighteen. There’s plenty of good men and women I’ve served with that have been broken by less.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“You were a stupid kid, but even then, you got your sister out. After, through all the pain you still made sure she was set above everything else. That’s better than a lot would have managed. Now I suppose you’re on the precipice, Mal. I can see in your eyes that you’re still allowing yourself to be swept along by the current of events. That’s fine whilst those events are positive, but Talia’s still out there. The Abyss is still out there, and unless I’m misunderstanding, you’re still a target. You need to be careful, Mal, else you’ll have fought your way out of the deep sea current only to drown in the shallows.”

Malan’s breath caught in his throat, and his jaw hung slightly loose as he looked at his captain. “What do you suggest?”

“Take control of your own damned life, Malan. Analyse your fuck ups and flaws. Learn from them. Fix them. Make decisions based on who you want to be, not on fear of who you are. You’re Starbound, now. Soon enough, people are going to be looking to you to lead them out of situations like the Jauda. You’ll need to not just survive, but carry everyone else with you, too. Are you ready for that? If not, how will you get yourself to be?”

She rose, clapping him on the shoulder as she did so. “If you can’t figure that out, you’ll end up like you were two years ago: piles of bodies at your back, and blood on your hands you can’t erase. Except that this time? It will have been your responsibility. Believe me, I know.”

Malan sat with her words for a good while after she left, head swimming as he nursed his drink. Swept along was exactly how he felt his life was at the moment. Starbound. Supplies. Nexus. Abyss. Things kept happening to him, and he was in no position to respond to them, let alone be prepared for them.

He spent a little while thinking about his choices after the Jauda. Why had he never taken steps to prepare himself for a situation like that happening again? The obvious answer was that he hadn’t felt like he deserved to survive the first time. That he should have died on the Jauda along with just about everybody else.

But that answer didn’t cut it when it wasn’t only him that was affected by his lack of readiness. Maybe he should have been with the dead on the Jauda, but that did nothing for the people he could still help.

Instead of deciding to do better, he’d run as far as his legs could take him.

No more.

No more running. No more being swept along by events. Elena was right. It was his life, and using it to wallow helped nobody. Even if the Jauda had been his fault, how had two years spent scrubbing sensors and taking shit from Beric made that better? How did that atone for anything at all?

Now he had the world at his feet. Starbound. Voidborn—whatever that really meant. He could do anything, but was still letting life sweep him along, barely keeping his own head above water. Only now, people would be looking to him to stop them from drowning. He couldn’t afford to do that anymore. He didn’t want to be that person anymore.

He didn’t know whether it was some kind of atonement still, not really. Perhaps he’d always felt this strongly about. But he wanted to be the kind of person people could look to when there was nowhere else they could turn. The kind of person that could reach into the kinds of hell he’d seen, and pull you right out.

He wanted to be strong.

Malan finished his drink, head clearer than it had been in a very long time, before rising and striding out of the bar, ignoring Julian’s eyes on his back. His room in the Citadel was a short walk from the attached bar, and only minutes passed between him leaving there and arriving at his door.

He reached for the handle, and froze. His helmet snapped back over his head, and his gauntlets flooded with power almost without conscious thought as his brain processed the fact that his door was ajar. Gritting his teeth, he pushed through, gauntlets raised.

No more.

Nothing. His display scanned the room frantically, responding to his own trepidation, but all signs of life besides his own were absent. Nothing had been disturbed, taken, or even moved. He lowered his gauntlets slowly—perhaps he’d simply left his door unlocked.

But, even as that thought flickered through his mind, he saw the only change the visitor had made. A small note, made with old-school paper and pen, tucked between his pillows.

Maintaining his sense of caution, he checked every conceivable angle he could think of for some kind of trap, but found nothing, so carefully slid the note out from its place wedged between his pillows and began to read with a growing frown.