#clone commander chyth

It was, of course, impossible to tell when they first got stuck in the loop.

“What’s happening?”

“Hyperspace lane collapsed!” 

“Pilots! Ease us out before we cycle!”

“Readings indicate celestial bodies outside the lane, it’s a risk-”

“What’s happening?”

“Hyperspace lane collapsed!”

“Pilots! Ease us out before we cycle!”

Commander Chyth’s voice was almost completely gone now, so often had he repeated those words until they were just noises, just meaningless sounds in the suffocating pressure of a loop. Ama’s fingers, hands, arms were numb from her unrelenting grip on the command console, her fingertips bleeding after minutes - hours? days? perhaps only mere milliseconds - of anchoring herself there in fear. She’d automatically reached for it in fear, and now she couldn’t let go. It hurt, the skin of her fingertips scraped raw from the violent vibrations of the metal as the Mercurial shuddered around them, but she couldn’t pull away, no more than Chyth could stop himself from asking those questions, no more than the troopers at the consoles could force themselves to input something, anything, that would make it stop.

“What’s happening?”

She wanted to scream but she couldn’t, time didn’t work like that - she hadn’t been screaming when they fell in, so the scream could only build in her lungs, the back of her throat, as the loop suffocated her, suffocated the command deck, all of the troopers, suffocated the entire ship without even a moment to take a breath. Moments didn’t exist anymore - only this one, the one where they fell in and couldn’t claw their way back out. Time condensed and stretched, pulled her apart piece by piece and slammed her back together again half a million times in what could easily have been either a second or a century. She had been looking at Misi when the lane collapsed, when time became a whirlpool instead of a safe, familiar progression. 

“Hyperspace lane collapsed!”

“Pilots! Ease us out before we cycle!”

She was looking at Misi, feeling as though her muscles were being unwound strand by strand. His shadow was shifting like ripples in dark water. It did not match his current form anymore.

“Readings indicate celestial bodies outside the lane, it’s a risk-”

She was looking at Misi, and he was changing. 

His familiar expression of light-hearted ease gone in favor of furrowed concentration, she could feel how time and gravity shifted towards him, around him, she wanted to look away. His skin began to crack as he fought against the restraints of time, breaking like porcelain. It hurt her eyes. She wanted to look away. She couldn’t look away.

“What’s happening?”

She was looking at Misi, even when the intense golden light scattered through his skin until his corporeal form shattered and shifted into something as malleable and fluid as water, a being made of impossible planes and angles, as bright as a new star, and then Misi stood tall and leapt into the air, swimming against the current of time that had trapped them there. And then he was gone.

“Hyperspace lane collapsed!”

She didn’t know where he went - she could only stare at the spot where he had been, staring at an afterimage of him burnt onto her eyeballs, but she felt the deck of the ship shift under her exhausted legs. The Mercurial shrieked around them, the loop desperate to hold on even as Misi forced the ship, forced the entire ship, out of its grasp - and then Ama’s muscles gave out and she collapsed to the floor with an exhausted cry, troopers hitting the deck all around her, their armor a cacophony of brilliant, blessed change. Time slipped back into linearity and began to march on. 

“We’re out!”

She wanted to cry, almost did, as Chyth took a shaky breath and called out, his voice hoarse, for status checks, for someone to check the time, to get the status of the rest of the troopers.

A disbelieving voice confirmed that they’d been stuck in a loop for three minutes and forty-six seconds. They didn’t ask how every single one of those seconds had actually felt like hours; everyone understood. Every second felt like an hour felt like a grain of sand threaded into every shaken nerve.

Her muscles shook and trembled like water as she lay against the cold floor, trying to catch her breath. She could hear the others panting and groaning and cursing to themselves all around her. Someone - maybe more than a few someones - vomited, cursed loudly, and then vomited again. 

And now her eyes could finally well with tears, trying to clear away the afterimage of an angel in brilliant transformation from her burned pupils. Her eyes closed and after a minute, she heard the familiar flutter of wings.

“I’m sorry, Ama,” came a voice, suddenly near her head. A warm Human-shaped hand on her shoulder. She couldn’t even find the energy to turn her face towards him. He sounded as exhausted as she felt. “You were looking right at me, but I had to push us out of there.”

“S’okay.” Her voice sounded as if it were many years out of practice. Now she could feel the beat of her heart in the raw scrapes on her fingertips, felt the tiny droplets of warm blood drip out like the steady ticking of a clock. “Better than being stuck like that.”

“The afterimage should clear away on its own, eventually” he murmured apologetically. “If it doesn’t, I give Knockout full permission to hunt me for sport as retribution.”

Someone gave a snort of derisive laughter close by. Ama tried to open her eyes and, underneath the burned angel scorching her retinas, saw the face of her very tired, very concerned friend. All she could say was simply: “It was cool to see.”