[hr][img]http://i.imgur.com/RTOhWdx.png[/img][hr]

Declan was nervous, as he was wont to be when he wasn’t needed. At the moment, no one was bleeding out, and no one was dying. Except, of course, for the poor bastards on Mars. He couldn’t help them, though. No one could. 

He decided to abandon that train of thought. Things were grim enough without worrying about what he couldn’t do. It was high time he started to worry about the things he [i]could[/i] do, which at the moment was a limited list. Still, at least there [i]was[/i] a list. 

He paced around his room. He had organized his books. He had memorized the ship’s map. When seemed as though he had exhausted the limits of what he could do in his quarters, he moved to the nearest medbay. It was an impressive space, with all the bells and whistles he expected of the [i]Vitae[/i]. You couldn’t expect to preserve humanity with cheap medical supplies. He couldn’t fathom the cost of all of this, the medicines, the operation space, the tools, everything was top of the line. He supposed that, in the grand scheme of things, all the money in the world paled in comparison to the human race. Still, as one who had grown up without a lot of it, the amount of money required was dizzying to think about. He left the medbay and began to pace the hall outside of it. Before long, his mind began to drift.

[hr]

It had happened so fast. He had been talking with one of the [i]Serpentis’s[/i] other crewmembers, he remembered. An Ensign. She was the girlfriend of one of his friends, trying to get him to come out with them to a pub once they landed for leave.

“Come on!” She said fervently. “It’ll be fun! Besides, I need someone to keep Jack from getting too crazy.”

“No one can keep Jack from getting too crazy.” Declan laughed. “‘Too crazy’ is kind of his thing.”

“Please?”

“I can’t, I have shit to do.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Why don’t you go bother my sister, she’s your friend too, right?”

“I did and she said the exac-” She was cut off by a massive [i]boom[/i]. The ship shook violently, and Declan lost his balance, hitting his head on the floor. This turned out to save his life, as a pipe super-heated and burst right next to where they had been talking. The air was filled with steam, and Declan noticed that his ears were ringing. Blood was dripping down his left ear. He wrenched open his eyes and noticed that she was on the ground too, but she had a large piece of shrapnel through her neck. Declan stood up as another explosion reverberated through the halls. 

He stumbled numbly towards the Ensign. He checked her pulse through the wrist and it told him what he already knew. She was dead. He sprinted away from her body, towards where his sister was. He practically fell down a set of stairs and turned a corner. He watched as his sister and a group of engineers from the lower decks ran down the hall towards him. Another explosion, this time further down the hall. The fireball enveloped the engineers and a shockwave threw Declan a good twenty feet. He didn’t remember much else. Apparently, he had made his way to the upper decks and started treating some of the many, many wounded. He survived that day, somehow. He came out of it with a promotion, a medal, and a letter of cordial invitation aboard the [i]Vitae[/i]. 

[hr] 

He snapped back to reality. He needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, he decided. Twice, he had cheated death. Twice, he had lived while others had died. He had to do something with his life, right? He wasn’t so nihilistic as to believe that life was [i]completely[/i] meaningless. There’d be people to help, eventually. Until then, there was nothing to do but wait.