Dying of the Light

WARNING: Mentions of emotional abuse, heavy existential dread. Reader discretion is advised.

You haunt me.

Ultraman Trigger looked out on the universe.

Billions upon trillions of stars, flashing like pinpricks in the inky darkness of the cosmos, unfathomable light years away. Nebulae swirled and churned in a rainbow storm of dust and life-to-be. Planets turned their circles, sometimes show and patient, sometimes at speeds incomprehensible to mortal eye. All around were lights, sounds, colours - things that would stagger the imagination of any human able to perceive it all in this way.

But Trigger could find no joy in it. No solace from his thoughts.

Every lie. Every sick joke. Every waking moment. Thousands of years gone and the memory of you still burns.

His almond eyes seemed fixed on a point so distant that mortal eye would bleed if it attempted the same feat. He did not breathe - his kind did not need to, and in this near-total vacuum there was no point. Behind him, the shining sun of Earth - Sol - raged on, throwing out its fire across the face of the one planet orbiting it that could ever support intelligent life. It looked close, but it also seemed somehow incredibly distant, as though perspective and distance had become optional things.

And Trigger knew, in the back of his mind, that there were thousands of other universes out there, with their own Sols and their own Earths, each doing the exact same thing. Some younger, some older.

He derived no comfort from it.

That's all you are now. A memory. A thought in my head. And you leave me here, alone.

Idly, he reached out towards the closest star he could see - part of the tail of Draco, he thought. Without really knowing why or how, he plucked it from the black canvas as one would pluck a cherry from the stem and brought it close. It felt like a pea in his fingers as he turned it over, focused on how its shining brilliance was now but a mere speck in his grasp.

So why does it still hurt? Why does all of it stand so clear and fresh, as though it was yesterday? Shouldn't I be above such things? Such pain and regret?

He let the star go. As if on a bungee cord, it flew back, trailing violet fire behind it, and settled neatly back into the position it originally marked, among its brothers. As indistinguishable from any other star as all the rest.

I am the last of the Giants of Light. I am one with the stars. I perceive the forces of creation, raging and dancing in ways no mortal could comprehend. The passing of aeons is but the blink of an eye in my time. I am young, yet I am old. I should have no business with the race I protected, no reason to care...

He turned to face the Earth. It was like turning around in the middle of the ocean. There was no air to resist him, yet his movement was slow and languid, almost lazy.

...so why do I?

He could make out the land below. America, a huge green-and-brown slab covering the deep blue of the ocean. Beneath that, the hook-shape of South America, linked by the thin, straggly line of Mexico and others. As the light of the sun faded away, casting the continents into darkness, the lights of towns and cities, motes merging into blobs merging into great swathes, light up across the surface, a tide of tiny hellos on the inky silence. But no brighter than the stars all around him.

Funny. He couldn't tell where one land ended and another began. Borders weren't a thing from up here. He wondered how many were in any inch of space he could look upon. Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe more? Were he in the mood, he could have made the attempt. Eyes, ears, touch... all of them were, as normal to him as a human's were to them, were like electron microscopes by comparison.

My father always said that it was right to protect the small. The weak, the incapable. They have no voice with which to speak, no hand with which to beat back the darkness. That the light that burns the briefest burns the brightest, and that is why it was worthy of our notice.

But... 

There was a noise behind him, a noise that shouldn't have been. He turned around again.

The tunnel of darkness roared like a hurricane before him. The light of devoured stars, torn apart at the very seams, crowned its rim, a final desperate halo against the inevitable. The inverted eyes of the adversary, hot coals of insanity in the smoky nothingness, glared out from the very centre across millions of light years that were, somehow, mere metres. A voice, low and rumbling, the insidious growl of grinding cliffs, shook him to the core as black tendrils crawled out towards him with calculated patience.

"There is no life... in the void.

"Only... death."

And just like that, it was gone. Faded away, revealing the same panorama of nebulae and galaxies as before.

Only... was it the same?

Trigger didn't notice. He was slowly realizing that whatever he'd been dreading hadn't happened. No claws had come to crush him, no ropey limbs ensured him. And riding on the back of that realization came, to even his own surprise, an almost disappointed contempt.

...is that all?

He drew himself up to his full height, glaring back at where the shadowed face of his enemy had once been. A kind of resolute, iron-willed defiance ignited in his breast like a flame.

"Is that all?!" he demanded aloud, his voice echoing into the star-pocked abyss. "Did you really think you could scare me with that?! You're no less of a memory! A shadow of something long dead! You're gone, mere dust in the wind! But me? I'm still here! I'm as eternal as the multiverse itself, and as long a there's a star left shining, I'll-"

Boom.

He turned for the final time.

And gaped as Sol, exhausted of hydrogen, no longer able to sustain itself, expanded. It swelled like a huge balloon, its once gold-orange skin flushing into cherry red, and all that lay in its path blackened, burned and was torn apart. The dust of dead planets was dragged into the fire, feeding a dying hunger that could never be stopped. And, before the eyes of the last Giant of Light, the Earth began to boil, seas shrinking and forests turning into blackened slurry.

Oh.

His stomach went cold.

...the multiverse will die.

It seemed so absurd. Something so huge and infinite, layered upon itself again. How could it be happening? But as he looked around, he could sense it. Stars flickering out and shutting off, leaving worlds in frigid blackness. Nebulae tearing themselves apart, fading into nothing as the stars they once birthed consumed them and died in their turn. Planets and asteroids flew screaming into the maws of black holes that, in turn, would contract and fade into nothing.

And it was happening everywhere. Over and over again. In every universe.

This... this is happening too fast!

The thuds and pops and booms of the dying universe assaulted his ears from all around. he covered them, trying to shut it all out, but still the cacophony raged around him. Colours died before his eyes and swathes of starlight turned into cold, homogenous nothing wherever he looked. And there was nothing he could do.

Ultraman Trigger trembled, watching, helpless. Wracked by a dread he'd only ever felt once before.

I don't want to go! Why can't I start again?! Wipe the slate clean, start afresh?! The end seemed so... distant, so far away!

Somehow, mixed in the insanity and raging noise as the multiverse ground to a halt, he could hear it again. The mocking laugh. The laugh of the one he'd known, had trusted. Someone whom he'd loved, so long ago. But that love had been twisted, corrupted. It had pulled him, like a dog on a leash, into doing something terrible, and when he'd realized the depths of what he'd done it was too late. And then it had been thrown back into his face like a dirty rag.

It had never been real, had it? She'd never meant a word she'd said. It was all one big step in a plan, a plan in which he'd been no more than another cog. But the idea still hurt. Some part of him still reached, still grasped for something, anything, turning the blame on himself and refusing to accept the falseness of what had once been-

"STOP IT!" he screamed into the nothingness. "LEAVE ME ALONE!"

There was no reply. Only the popping of stars gasping their last, which was slowly growing quieter.

"WHY ME?!" His howls had nothing to echo off anymore, muted and flat in the growing silence. "WHY DID YOU CHOOSE ME?! WHAT WAS SO SPECIAL ABOUT ME,YOU FREAK?!"

Still no answer. And, Trigger realized, there never would be now.

He felt himself grow cold, all of a sudden. Sol was gone - he couldn't sense its light on him anymore, couldn't feel the once-comforting warmth of his ways. His arms fell, limp, by his sides, and he hung in the ever-darkening abyss like a rag doll floating in a dark sea.

It won't matter now, he thought. Any minute now. All those memories, good and bad, will be gone. Any minute now, and all those years will be wasted.

And I die in regret. Regret for everything.

The darkness hemmed in. His colour timer was flashing, but he couldn't hear it and didn't care.

Any minute now.

He felt himself melting away.

Father... I'm...

-------

He woke up to the smell of cooking.

He sat, in the back of Joy's mind, for a good, long while. Breakfast and conversation both called to him, but he didn't answer either. He tried not to think about what he'd seen, about what he'd felt. It had only been a dream, after all. Another ridiculous nightmare. It couldn't hurt him.

But she already had.

Since denial didn't work, Ultraman Trigger tried tasting bacon for the first time instead.