Avery Trent - Chapter 16 (Ajax)

The universe was cold and dark and empty to Jason. Once, it had been cruel, but now even that was gone. There was only the dull, residual pain, throbbing distantly in Jason's heart. She was gone; his beautiful vessel, the silver shell mercilessly crushed — just obliterated. Despair clawed at his soul, but he remained desolate, sat up against a wall in the lobby, staring at the stony gray floor between his feet.

Technically, the universe wasn't completely empty. There were some people around him, and it was decently bright, but Jason was only vaguely aware of these things, and none of them mattered. Nothing mattered to him anymore, and nothing should have mattered to anyone else at that point.

Avery was lost in his own swirling world of thoughts, beside Jason, but he was trying to pull himself out of it. Some authorities had arrived just a few instants after whatever happened to the parking garage, and they were working on whatever it was that space authorities worked on in these situations. Raising his head and gazing about — as his reverie was much shallower, now, than Jason's — Avery surveyed the authorities, hospital staff, and random hysterical patients throughout the lobby.

“And you're sure it was a giant solar rabbit?” an officer in a long, navy blue coat was asking as they interviewed a stout, wide-eyed patient.

“Yessir, yessir,” the patient said, their chubby jowls waving exaggeratedly.

“Nay!” Another patient hobbled up to the authorities, hand raised. “It was a wyrm! I saw it with me own eyes!” Most of his face was made up of his two yellow eyes, Avery noted; perhaps he really had caught sight of what had attacked the hospital.

“Hey, Jason,” Avery said, turning from the commotion and poking his friend's shoulder. Jason looked up at him with frigid, blank eyes, a furrow crawling along his brow. He stared for a moment before facing the floor once more.

“Jason,” Avery repeated, poking him again. Jason grunted glumly in response.

Avery chalked his attempts up to a disappointing 'futile' and decided to investigate a bit more while he waited for Jason's condition to improve. He expected to get a lot of investigating done.

“Excuse me,” he said, approaching a tall-necked authority who faced away from him.

With a whisk of their massive navy blue tailcoat, the alien spun around and peered down at Avery, blinking, raising an eyebrow expectantly. The purple spots on their orange skin glowed menacingly as a bubble of semi-darkness enveloped Avery and the alien.

“Er, I was wondering, what was that thing?” Avery asked, trying to sound confident when he really just wanted to excuse himself from all of creation at that moment. He wondered if it was in his best interest to acknowledge the darkness closing in on them or not. “Y'know, the, uh, thing that sorta ate the building?”

The authority blinked again and their spots stopped glowing. The darkness slowly receded.

“Son, never speak to me again,” they said, violently turning back to the other direction, nearly giving Avery another concussion with their swinging coat.

Avery tried not to wet himself as he cautiously returned to Jason, walking backwards. He considered asking another authority, but he wasn't sure if he felt like experiencing any more excitement just yet.

“It was a space wyrm,” a voice suddenly whispered from around the corner, to Avery's left.

“What?” Avery turned in surprise, but there was no one there.

After a short pause, he stepped along the wall until he reached said corner, then flung himself around it. No one, again. Confusion flooded his skull, making it a bit itchy. He scratched the top of his head and let his mind wander, wincing as his apparent concussion released a throbbing aftershock.

His vision split momentarily, wavering in his pupils, and he stumbled. Catching the wall with a gasp and clamping his eyes shut, he waited out the lapping waves of pain. Eventually they subsided, and he looked up again. Before him, on the other side of the corner, was a long corridor, all lined with doors. At the end appeared to be another corridor running through it, crafting a large T-shape.

One of the doors at the far end, before the intersection, slyly slipped ajar, snatching at Avery's attention.

He squinted, glanced back at Jason, who was still trapped in his sorrows, then made his way down the hall. It only felt like a couple of minutes, walking to that door — far less, even, perhaps — but thanks to the way the galaxy works, it must have been an eternity; and a very weak one, especially. Whether that or not, Avery reached the door, and just as he did, it abruptly slammed shut. He nearly lost a finger or two, and jumped in both fright and surprise.

“You should try knocking,” another voice, this time behind him, offered, just as quietly as the previous one on the corner.

Spinning around, Avery tried to catch the advice-giver, but was only greeted by another slamming door. Turning back to face the first door, he paused for a moment. Knocking was the normal, polite thing to do — at least on Earth it was — but in his short time on the other side of the galaxy, so far, things had been very odd, so maybe knocking was just a rude trick set up by the whispering voice to get him in trouble with a deranged patient lying behind this door. He shrugged and knocked anyway.

The door silently crept open, revealing a dimly-lit room and a long, narrow white cot in the center of the leftmost wall. A mini-fridge sat in the opposite corner, almost straight ahead from the door.

“Hello?” Avery called cautiously into the soft darkness of the room.

“Yes, yes, come on in, dearie,” a voice called back, followed by a dreadful wheezing and a light pair of coughs.

Avery slid the door open a couple inches more, then slipped in and shut it gently behind him. Scanning the room, he learned that a search for further details in it would be a wild goose chase; the only things besides the cot and the fridge were a sad, blade-less ceiling fan and an empty curtain track forming a U on the ceiling above the bed.

There was also, of course, the patient. Avery stepped closer to them, taking in what he could in the dimness of the room. Tucked beneath a series of heavy white sheets, they appeared very small. What little light there was, provided by a miniscule nightlight by the mini-fridge, revealed their skin to be some kind of tinted shade of orange and their face to be overrun by highways of age-lines. Their eyes were barely visible, buried under ancient rolls of skin that practically drooled from their forehead, and a thin cap of white hair sat, matted and slick, on the crown of their head.

“Hello, my darling,” they spoke in a creaky whisper. “Take a seat.”

Avery sat upon a wobbly old stool that seemed to have just manifested itself, but he remained silent, astonished at the apparent age of this poor, tiny creature.

“Trent,” they spoke again, after an uncomfortably lengthy silence.

“Oh, hm?” Avery shook from his stupor. “I'm sorry, what were you say-- Wait, how do you know--”

“I know more than you'd be comfortable knowing I know,” they replied with a stronger voice.

“Who-- who are you?” Avery asked, strangely stuck in awe of this person.

They struggled for a moment, working to shift their shoulders and head higher up on their pillow. Grunting and wheezing and sipping in air, they finally seemed to fall into a more cozy position, albeit not much different than their previous one, then replied.

“I am called Ajax, I am a man of the stars. Or, was. Permanent bed-rest makes that second part a slight difficulty.”

Avery simply nodded.

“Trent, you need to listen to me, now, you hear?”

Avery nodded again, though not because he exactly heard; more so to keep up the appearance that he retained some intelligence before this incredible character. In all honesty, he wasn't entirely sure why he was so taken by the greatness they exuded, even in this drooling, wheezing mess on a random hospital bed. It would definitely have to be the omniscience.

“You're not listening, are you...?” Ajax noted.

Avery began to nod, then paused, then shook his head guiltily. Ajax sighed, then wheezed, then coughed.

“Okay, can you listen now?” he pressed, once the coughing had subsided.

“Yes, sorry,” Avery said.

“Good, okay, so. You're in danger, Trent.”

Avery already knew this.

“I, er, kinda picked that up a while ago. You know, Dorothy, the Cephalods, giant hospital-eating monsters.”

“I don't mean those things, though, Trent.”

Avery did not know this.

“What, then?” he asked, attempting to mask his sudden anxiety.

“Volks. Your friend, Jason Volks.”

“Jason?”

“Yes, how many other Jason Volkses do you know?” Ajax asked, sarcastic and rhetorically. “He is leading you on a dangerous path, Trent. You may one day think of yourself as a hero during your journeys with Jason Volks, but know this, Trent. Know this. Know that you are not a hero — that even then, you will not be a hero.”

Avery was, by this point, very confused.

“I don't think I'm a hero. I mean, I've never done anything heroic in my life!”

“Not yet, Trent, not yet you don't. But believe me, the opportunity for heroics will present itself many times, and seduced by them, you will meet your fate. If you remain with Jason Volks, only doom will find you, at the end of your adventure. Find yourself another envoy, I beg you, for your own sake!”

Avery stared, wide-eyed and bewildered, his mind and heart racing a marathon against one another, his palms sweating and his throat gone dry. Before he could make up any sort of response, though, a shout came from the corridor outside.

“Avery! Dammit, Avery, where the Mars are you!”

Jason.

“Beware, Trent,” Ajax warned with another wheeze. “Heed this encounter.”

Avery nodded, not to Ajax or anybody at all in particular, but more to compose himself somewhat, and then he went for the door.

He slipped back into the corridor just in time to stop Jason from wandering down the intersecting hallway and probably getting lost in the hospital forever.

“Jason, hold on!” he said, stepping away from the door so as not to raise suspicion.

Jason turned to face him, then raised an eyebrow.

“Where the hell were you?” he asked, suspicion coating his face.

Avery wanted to kick himself for that failure at keeping suspicion to a minimum.

“Er, just around?”

“Just around,” Jason repeated stonily. “Alright, fine. Well we need to leave. I woke up on the floor and those bluecoats out there started giving me the heebies and the jeebies. More jeebies than heebies, but that's still bad in my book.”

“Okay, um, how are we supposed to 'get out of here'?” Avery asked, implying their lack of transport.

Jason glared at him intensely.

“Don't you talk about her like that. Like she's dead,” he whispered threateningly, struggling to keep his bottom lip from pouting.

The door opposite Ajax's room swung open all of a sudden, and a small head poked itself out.

“It was a space wyrm!” it declared with a high-pitch, then slammed the door shut again.

Jason blinked and watched the door quietly for a moment. The corridor grew an increasingly awkward atmosphere. Avery tore his eyes from the door and watched Jason instead, shifting his feet as he waited for whatever would come next.

“A space wyrm,” Jason finally growled. “Avery, pack your bags.”

“I don't have any bags,” Avery replied.

“Well, whatever, then. Point is we're gonna get my ship back.”

“How?”

“We're hijacking an ambulance.”