endlessly
he’s no longer angry. anger requires effort, requires him to keep it ablaze every so often, and he’s done wasting effort on something as futile as being angry at that useless guy. there are better things to be angry at. like the blue sun corporation, who murdered his entire family, or the gorram piece of metal he’s working on that doesn’t seem to want to bend the way he needs it to to be able to enhance their accelerator.
he thinks of the people he’s come in contact with since it all happened. ephraim, who continued to provide him with food despite the strange times at which he’d come looking for it. audrey, who is giving him sour looks again as if they’ve gone a few years back in time. (as if she’s the only person allowed to act bitchy). jaewon, who probably is real happy knowing his engineer is hard at work again. as if he hasn’t done a proper job all along, yihan or no yihan. and that’s the end of the list, really. somehow he has managed to avoid pretty much everyone aside from these two.
he’s done avoiding now, however. he’s done with pretty much everything.
rather than throwing the piece of metal away like he would have done over the past couple of weeks, henry finds himself slowly lowering his hands and just staring at it for a while. it’s not cooperating. nothing in his life seems to go the way he wants it to. it started with the revolution going sideways and it hasn’t stopped since. getting stuck on a slave trader, his crew’s mutiny, people burning his rescuer alive. now even serenity - the refuge he thought he’d finally found - feels like it’s falling apart beneath his fingers.
he’s alone, he’s always alone, and it hurts so bad, somewhere in the middle of his chest, just beneath his rib cage. somewhere he’s got a hard time breathing and it feels like he’s trapped under several layers of heavy weight, only inches away from crushing him entirely. but not even working the metal brings him an escape from it anymore, not even the thing that has always given him comfort, that has always managed to make him feel slightly better, works for him anymore now.
heaving a deep sigh, he lowers his head into his hands, covering his face with his palms and standing like that for a solid few minutes.
he’s tired. he’s so gorram tired of it all. he doesn’t understand how just weeks ago he could be thinking of going off to some quiet planet to live out the rest of his days in comfort and quiet. not taking the revenge that has been keeping him on his feet for years, not spending any more time trying to find people to fill the void inside of him, not caring about the rest of the verse.
he still doesn’t care about the rest of the verse, but he doesn’t care for the quiet planet dream anymore either.
he doesn’t care about anything anymore.
like a rock afloat out in the black, just tumbling around the great nothingness with no goal in mind, nowhere to turn, no way to change course. continuously floating on the stream of the stars.
mindlessly. aimlessly. endlessly.
he sinks down until he’s seated on the cold, metal floor of the engine room, back resting against the whirring machine that’s keeping the entire ship afloat in the great beyond. the rhythmical thrumming only causes the devastating emptiness inside of him to expand, until it feels like it’s all-encompassing.
and he wants out of it.