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“I’m just… tired,” I whimper when I can manage to speak clearly.
“Humans sleep when they are tired. You are more than tired. You are sad. Tell me why you are sad.”
I wrack my brains for an answer that he’ll understand.
“I don’t think I am sad anymore. I think I’m holding onto all the sadness from before.”
I don’t expect him to understand, but he ends up nodding.
There's something about Brawn which makes him easy to talk to. He should be the most intimidating creature in all of creation, but I guess we shared something on that pier, something that makes me trust him. Maybe it’s because I saw him when he was wounded and at his weakest. Maybe I can tell him the secret I’ve been holding onto for years now.
“I’m not well. But it’s nothing physical. Nothing your doctor is going to find in an examination. I have a different malady.”
“What kind of disease?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not,” he lets out a growl. “But human, I do not find it amusing when you give me your sapien attitude. I expect your full and complete honesty in all things.”
“It’s called depression. Some people get it because that’s how their brains are. Other people get it because how their lives have happened.” That’s a clunky as fuck explanation, but it’s all I’ve got in this moment of exhaustion. Every breath I take is snotted up with the results of my tears, and explaining my psyche to this creature is not an undertaking I’m ready for.
“So you are sad because of the past. That is why you were expecting to be slaughtered by your own people.”
“Earth is a pretty fucked up place. Be glad you’re not from there.”
“Tell me what happened to you.”
“I really don’t want to.”
He makes a snorting sound and moves to sit down beside me, perching himself on the ledge in a way that has to be very uncomfortable for him. He is just so very large, there’s something about him which is almost movie-like, or maybe cartoonish. Everything about this experience is so strange I feel as if I’m just a few degrees away from real.
I reach out for him and touch his thigh. I feel the rough, hard power of his body. I feel the reality of him grounding me all over again. Touching him helps me breathe properly.
He smiles at me, but says little more. I’m glad he’s not trying to force me to talk. There’s too much to say, and I don’t want to say any of it. But I do end up saying something.
“Life is just... watching horrible things happen to other people, and then waiting for something horrible to inevitably happen to you. I saw so much in my work. I saw things nobody should have to see. You have no idea what humans are capable of doing to one another.”
“You are an inventive species, so as a result, there are horrors. They are inevitable, no matter how much you try to avoid them. Sometimes I think the universe itself is one great big horror generator.”
“You sound like me, sort of,” I laugh. “Except you're not angry about those things.”
“I save my anger for that which I can destroy. I cannot destroy existence itself, and I would not try even if I could. The nature of, well, nature, is what it is.”
He’s speaking recursively, but I know it is hard to pin these concepts down and make any sense of them. I appreciate him talking to me at all. Most guys get super fucking weird if you mention the big D word and stop calling you back. Or at least, that’s how it’s happened to me over the years. Happened so many times I stopped dating dudes and started dating the job.
“I fear I have bad news for you, Ariel.”
“What’s that?”
“You think the world you escaped was cruel and unfair. I cannot promise you the one that you will find on Mother is any better. The universe does not run on the subjective feelings of sentient beings. It runs on consumption and domination. I cannot change that. I cannot fight it. I can understand it, and wield it to my advantage.”
He’s letting me know he's the same kind of ruthless bastard who rises to the top on Earth. He’s telling me he’s not a good person — not that he is a person at all. Every glance, every look reminds me that this is a creature made of pure strangeness.
“I guess that will at least make it familiar?” I try for a smile and almost succeed.
“The good news is you will not have to struggle on my world the way you did on yours. This may give the illusion of fairness, perhaps even of a perfect utopia. Will an illusion do?”
“Maybe?”
* * *
Brawn
I knew of the human’s inherent sadness long before she gave voice to it. She considers it a disease. I can see it in the flow of her thoughts and feelings, a black thread weaving through from time to time. It sucks the color from the other emotions and leaves them close to gray at times.
