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Walter was burning from the inside out. Around his heart wrapped ribs of crackling blue. A strange radiance surrounded him, searing him and making every inch of him feel aflame. He closed his eyes tight in pain and underneath his eyelids he saw arcs of crimson and white, impossible to ignore. Outside there was only freezing vacuum and the hot light of the sun and humans could not survive there, he could not survive here in this space station with this burning under his skin. Space was hostile to him, even enclosed in this tin can. He wanted to go home- he was at the forefront of technology out here- he wanted to go home.
He wanted to be with Helen in their little house and visit his brother in his strange mansion and laugh at the eccentricities of a life he’d decided against for himself. He wanted to feel solid ground under his feet and real light on his skin. He wanted to pick flowers and listen to birds singing and get his shoes wet running down a rain-soaked city street.
He could never go home. His heart was burning with strange fires and one would either kill him or have its way with him. After he’d burnt himself out it would toss his living corpse out into the world, a smiling spaceman who’d give his life away to others with no light left in his eyes. He knows he is dying even as his heart keeps beating blue and white and iridescent.
A hand took his wrist, a painful thing in this world of pain, and squeezed. He felt a tug and a change in the world around him, all its subtleties. His eyes were still closed, but the air changed, its smell and the sound of all the machines around him; the machines weren’t missing, they were just different. There was a sound of beeping and a radio running but not tuned into any channel.
He was too delirious to wonder about much. He cracked an eye open and watched the world swirl around him. Someone was lifting him onto a couch. He got flashes of a gloved touch, reflective goggles, green skin. “Who are you?”
“Easy, soldier. If I understood right, your wound should heal itself, but until then probably not a great idea to talk given that your lungs, well, wow, they’re on fire.”
“Are they?” He tried to look but his vision blurred and the smallest head movement made him dizzy. He dropped his head back onto the pillow. “You’re not human.”
“Woah there, what did I tell you about talking? You can’t see, but it does not look good in there.” He pat Walter twice on the shoulder. “Get some rest, we’ll talk in the morning.”
“Okay,” Walter tried to say but was too tired to. His lungs didn’t feel on fire. He closed his eyes and the world receded.
When he came to he felt much better. The wound had disappeared- a discrepancy so enormous that he wondered if he’d dreamed the whole thing. There was a strange tingling in his arms and legs, a lightness to his head. When he brought his hand to his chest it was hot to the touch, not just warm like a fever but with the intensity of boiling water or a hot stovetop. He pulled his hand away with a gasp of pain, shaking it out to feel the cool air on his skin as some kind of reprieve. There was an actual burn there, but within a couple seconds it had completely faded away.
He was somewhere unfamiliar, after all. A spaceship, not one in orbit but one in motion. He could feel the engine thrumming under him and see stars inching past outside a big bay window at the front of the room. In front of the window was an unfamiliar and complex array of controls, but he couldn’t see them clearly from his position laying on the couch. Across from him was a huge bulletin board covered with bits of paper and more of a variety of things on the edges, and behind him he could get the barest glimpse of a kitchenette.
Since he felt better, even though he was still a bit dizzy, he decided to get a better look around. He had been told to be wary against all potential threats, but never had that drilled into him. He’d served in the military, but always in peacetime, in space. He was more of a scientist than anything. If anyone here was hostile, he’d been vulnerable earlier. He wouldn’t say that he’d be dead already, because he didn’t know if he could be hurt by a weapon in the same way, right now, but he could’ve been restrained. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to get an idea of his situation, with a focus on escape routes and weaponry.
He pushed himself up into a sitting position-- or tried to, but his arms had a terrifying strength to them. He shot up like he’d jumped on the Moon and slammed into the ceiling, then fell with a crash back down. It was disorientating and strange. He was all at once aware of a thrumming power waiting just beneath his skin, something hot and strange that made his heart beat stronger and his every movement carry infinite force. Purely using his arms, he’d catapulted himself up to the ceiling, when normally it was a task for any human to leave the ground in that way at all.
Carefully, he tried to sit up from lying down using just his core muscles, but that sent him head over heels, the forward motion continuing and making him fall onto the ground. He swore and tried another time. This time, he envisioned the outcome he wanted, imagining himself getting up and standing on his feet; nothing more than that.Trepidatiously, he got up, concentrating on every step, and finally managed to stand and look around the room.
It was clearly a living space in addition to the place the ship was piloted from. In his time on the floor he’d grown familiar with the rug on the ground, probably put there to offset all the cold metal surrounding him. The paper on the bulletin board was all messy notes, some on scraps, some on sticky notes, some on full-sized printer pages, and some even scribbled on the corkboard itself. Multicoloured yarn tied them together. Relegated to the periphery were personal effects. Analogue pictures, souvenir postcards from places he’d never heard of, drawings and letters done in multiple hands, bright stickers half still on sheets that were pinned up, and strangest of all, a poster brightly advertising Steam Powered Giraffe, the only familiar thing in that jumble.
He stepped forward to get a closer look without thinking. As soon as he’d committed to a forward motion his force shot him forward, sending him flying into the center of the bulletin board. Papers fluttered down all around him.
Someone came running in. He vaguely recognized them- they must’ve met when he was injured. “What happened?”
“Superstrength, I think,” Walter said weakly from the floor. “Give me a second to concentrate.” He imagined standing the same way he did before and managed to get up without incident.
“Jeez.” The alien knelt down and started picking up all his papers. “Well, at least ya look better.” His voice was a bafflingly Southern drawl.
In all the time Walter had imagined meeting someone from another planet, it hadn’t gone like this, but then, he’d never expected to die in space and get superpowers. He was a Peter Walter, though- he could deal with absurdity. “Who are you?”
“Ravaxis Starburner. People call me Starburner on account of the star burning. You can call me Rav.” He offered a hand to shake.
“I’d rather not accidentally rip off your hand.”
Rav good naturedly mimed a handshake. Walter waved his hand around in the same way with a laugh.
“I’m Commander Peter Walter IV.”
Rav whistled. “That’s a mouthful.”
“People call me Walter.”
“I can see why.”
“Really- who are you? Why’d you save me?”
Rav sighed. “That’s kind of hard to explain. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll tell you the story.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, so I’m a time traveller, and I can go between dimensions as well. Just accept that bit. I can do it with this ship, and I’m built for it on account of I’m a descendant of people from multiple different dimensions. So one day I got a visit from my older self.
‘Well, hey there, old Rav!’ I said, though really I didn’t look that different. That was bad luck, on account of usually when I look like that I’m vague because all I’m doing is closing a time loop and saying the same thing to me I said way back when. This time I must’ve been older than I looked- which I am- because I made sense.
‘If you want to do something to help the universe, you should get the Commander on your side.’ Now, saving the universe on my own is an impossible task. I’ve assigned myself the goal of discovering heroes and calling them up when necessary rather than trying to hold my own. Gods can’t be fought by one person whose only powers are dimension hopping, time travel, and being able to make a damn good bomb out of mainly duct tape. And from what my older self told me you’re a hell of a hero. Godlike strength, powers, the ability to survive in space. I needed to find you when you were given those powers, and my older self gave me the coordinates.
I was running late, so I had to take the long way round. Dimensional rifts were murder to get through, and the fact I was doing this out of a sense of duty rather than for my own enjoyment didn’t help my mood. But I knew I needed you, and you needed me, and eventually we’d end up friends. And now we’re here.”
“Huh.” Walter tried to sit down on the couch, tripped over himself, got up, and sat down properly. That was a lot to process.
“Stay with me?” Rav asked. “I’ll teach you how to use your powers as best I can, set you up a room.”
Saving the universe, godlike powers… that was something of epic proportions. He couldn’t go home if he was embroiled in something like that. If he could save the universe, he couldn’t exactly say no, either. He was duty-bound, just like Rav. “Alright. And I’ll help you with whatever you’re doing.”
Rav frowned at the bulletin board, which still had missing papers all over it. “I think the next thing I was doing was convincing a space prince to end this devastating war going on in Universe Zeta. You still can’t go anywhere without falling over, though. I know an isolated planet a few light years away. You can practice there without damaging my spaceship.”
A few light years was a week’s distance in this ship. They fell into a routine. Walter slept in the living room. Every morning, he’d get up, try out another type of food proven to be non-toxic to humans to see if it was any more palatable than the last ( “I swear, you’re doing this on purpose. Why don’t I cook tomorrow?”) , and spend the day working with Rav on a project (“Thought today we’d set you up a room, or you could get on researching this planet we’re going to be headed to in a few weeks) , or learning how to fly the ship. There was a vast array of controls. Next to the usual wheel, pedals and stick, there were far more measurements than he was used to, a gearshift like one in a car with about twenty options, pedals colorcoded to match a set of glowing buttons, and a computer on the ceiling. Rav had to be absurdly competent, and maybe a little insane for entrusting his life to so much manual complexity.
The planet was a relief and an adventure. He learned that he could fly, that he could lift mountains, that there was essentially no limit to what he could do. He could even heal people, which he finds out when Rav insisted on climbing up one of the cliffs. The planet is all cliffs and mountains, gorgeous scenery to a larger scale than on earth, peaks reaching the stratosphere and chasms with no bottom. They sit out under the stars, and Walter gets to feel the ground under his feet.
It wasn’t the same as home. Sometimes he felt so lonely and homesick he thought he might die of it. But he couldn’t go back, not yet.
They meet the space prince, Walter taking a step back and letting Rav do whatever he did while he focused on actually helping the people in the war, using those new powers of him to what he thought were their fullest extent and then learning he could go further.
Back on the spaceship, worn out and letting it run on autopilot, Walter asked Rav, “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to fix people’s problems. Saving the universe.”
Rav smiled bitterly. “Call it amnesty. A chance at redemption. Why are you?”
“You asked. I’ve always gone out and ventured as far as I can go into the galaxy. Even when I was human. I didn’t enjoy it, but I don’t know anything else I can do but burn.”
“Neither do I, Commander. Neither do I. But someone from the future once told me that nothing good came of it.”
Walter got up. They’d finished his room on the way to that planet, back in his first week aboard. “Goodnight, Starburner.”
“G’night, Commander.”