Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Unarmed Combat

I am feeling guilty again.

Surprise!

Said no one ever.

If there is one thing that defines me, Admiral Adam Vir of the UNSC, it is my extreme propensity to guilt.

I think about how cold his hand was in mine as I stood over his hospital bed. I had tried t make a joke, like all awkward stupid people do, and he laughed, not because my joke was funny but because I was so damn awkward.

It seems strange now, everything that has happened, and thinking about him I feel only the rapture of guilt squeezing my chest. I did that to him, I'm the reason he lies in that hospital bed even after the injection is done.

Life has never been kind to my brother, as a great philosopher once said life is soup, my brother is a fork.

All joking aside, years and years of drug use weakened his heart and now its damaged.

Of course, I offered to fix it for him, I have more than enough money to pay for them to grow him a new heart. Hell, I would have given him mine if I thought he would take it., but I can't forget his sad smile as he took my hand and told me it was alright. He wasn't really meant to be a marine anyway.

I didn't understand, and I still don't. He might as well be speaking Klingon, except for the fact that if he WAS speaking Klingon than I would still understand him better than I do now.

And yes I speak Klingon, is anyone surprised?

He says he wants to go into drug counseling. I don't understand why he would choose not to get better with that option open, and he tells me its finally time to face the consequences of what he has done. I think its perfectly stupid, but he is my brother, and he is adamant about it.

I will miss having family aboard my ship.

Krill saved us, surprising no one, with a vaccine that.... Camouflaged us against the void. I don't know how it works, but mixed adaptid and lumin DNA put together.

Krill tells me that my pretty little soldier brain doesn't need to understand it, and I shrug and let him have his superiority. He earned it

The good news is Now I am not the only one.

Adaptid DNA runs in all of us, and the side effects are still unknown.

It didn't totally cure us of course, but Krill explained it like the chicken pox. The void sickness is inert but still present, we can't infect other people, but we can have.... Flare ups? Or he thinks we can.

I am the reason he thinks this.

I splash water into my face feeling the cool liquid run over my skin and down my jaw onto my neck. It makes the collar of my shirt unpleasantly wet as I lift my head and brace my hands against the sink. I have... trouble... looking at myself, seeing what I have become, but I force myself to look, to take in the man that stands before me in the mirror.

He doesn't look much like me anymore.

The eyepatch is the same, a part of my personality now, my remaining green eye is the same, my face is the same, for the most part,

The big differences?

The spiderwebbing of glowing veins that circles my bad eye and crawls their way down my neck.

Its like when you were in school and some kid would have a really bad cold soar and everyone would make fun of that kid for having Herpes.... Well now I have space herpes.

Leave it to me.

It is a mark of my status as infected, as patient zero to the space herpes. Krill thinks it will fade with time, but he also has a theory that, for me, it's a stress response, like someone breaks out in shingles on occasion if they have had chicken pox in the past. So yeah I have space shingles.... On my face.