Chapter Text
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.- Emily Dickinson
Red slammed into the ground at a few hundred miles per hour, and the force blasted through Keith’s body like a hammer blow. For a few agonized seconds, he imagined his bones powdering and his organs imploding and his skull splitting against the inside of his helmet like a ripe melon. The cockpit lurched forward. It flipped upside down; the gravity pulled at Keith’s molars and hair. Right side up; pain seared up his spine. Sideways, upside down. Constant rattling as Red tumbled through unknown landscape.
The viewport was blank and slate gray. The lights in the cockpit flickered strobe-like, epilepsy-inducing, turning all movement choppy and unreal. Keith caught staccato glimpses of his hands gripping the long-dead controls. The holoscreens, when they flared into existence, had staticked displays and nonsensical figures. The alarms were rough, scream-like, lurching in and out of hearing mid-blare. Sometimes Keith imagined he heard voices sputter through the coms line, but the sounds were less than fragments of words, and Keith had enough mental capacity to spare a despaired thought that he didn’t know if they were shouting for him or shouting for help.
The tumbling movement stopped in a sudden, concussive lurch. Keith’s body strained one last time against the seat harness, settled back, was still. The lights powered down with a humming pop. The alarms gave one more strangled warble before they finally fell dead.
Keith stared into the darkness and watched it swirl faintly—a trick of the eyes. For a few seconds, his body cycled through the sense memory of what had just happened. Then the fluid in his ears settled, and the lingering dizziness faded into pain and faint nausea. The metal of Red’s hull pinged and groaned. Keith’s breathing was hard and desperate and rattling, and it filled the black cockpit until it crowded everything out, until even Keith wasn’t there anymore, and it was just the sound of air slamming against lung tissue against tongue against teeth against metal and back again. He was alive. He was alive.
At which point, he passed out.