ok I've never posted proper fiction writing on here before but here's a melancholic drabble I wrote about what might've happened if Hilbert survived and if the Hephaestus crews wore dog tags.....
Dog Tags (Deaths of your former self)
Doctor Alexander Hilbert doesn't have a clue how Captain Lovelace found their old dog tags. Something tells him they shouldn't even be on the Hephaestus anymore, the SI-5 should have scrubbed away all evidence of his old crew years ago.
And yet, one afternoon Lovelace shoves her way into his lab, her neck jangling with seemingly five sets of dog tags. He stares in confusion as she shoves one at him, the name on it reads "SELBERG, ELIAS".
"Found these in a box in the storage room. I don't know what the hell they were doing there, but here-" She says as she flicks the dog tags - his old dog tags - closer when Hilbert hesitates to take them. He grabs them after a moment and tucks them into his pocket.
"That's everyone?" He asks, gesturing at all the chains floating around her throat.
"Yup." She says briskly as she turns toward the door, it seems this conversation is done.
But she pauses in the doorway for a moment, barely long enough to notice, wonders to herself, "Does he want anyone else's tags? Does he care? He had been close with- No, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter for a second what he wants or who he might miss in his own fucked up way. He doesn't deserve any of them." She leaves quickly.
A few very near-death experiences and one very uncomfortable spaceship flight later they're all back on Earth. Goddard hasn't killed them, and they've gone through enough interrogations, signed enough paperwork, and been threatened about the consequences of revealing what happened enough times to finally be allowed to return to society.
He still has his dog tags, though he's not called "Alexander Hilbert" anymore. A new name, a new job, start again, try again, pick up the broken pieces and keep going again. He still has the dog tags, "HILBERT, ALEXANDER", "SELBERG, ELIAS". Dmitri never got his name inscribed in metal and looped around his throat in-case he died. Nowadays he doesn't know if that was a blessing or a curse.
He's not sure what to do with the dog tags. If he was a poetic man he might take them to the coast, any coast, and throw them as hard as he could into the ocean. If he were a sentimental man he might bury them, maybe even find his way back into Russia, trace his way to that small graveyard in the smaller village where his family lies, bury his old selves next to them.
But Dr Hilbert wasn't poetic or sentimental, and neither is he, so he doesn't, it would be a ridiculously impractical waste of time anyways. But, Dr Selberg had his moments of poeticness, and Dmitri Volodin was nothing if not sentimental, for better or worse.
So he does think about it, about traveling to the coast and throwing his dog tags into the sea, no less cruel and deadly than the void of space. He thinks about burying them in cold frosty ground, stumbling his way through a eulogy he can half remember fragments of his mother reciting. He thinks about it, walks through the steps in his head, plans it out, precise as a dissection. But he doesn't, won't, can't act on any of it.
So he keeps the dog tags with him, tucks them into a little bag which he puts in the small pocket on the duffel bag he hasn't let out of his sight or grasp since they returned, full of his surviving research, his most and only prized possessions.
He isn't Dr Hilbert anymore, or Dr Selberg, he won't ever be either of them again, but, he'll keep them with him for the moment. Not indefinitely, he'll dispose of them at some point he promises himself, he must, but not yet, not soon, he'll keep them with him just a bit longer.
