Blue

“Fine, do it your way then!” I shouted.

My flare of temper was mostly lost on Terence and cost me precious oxygen and energy, but I was beyond caring. I was totally through with him, with our mission, with his arrogance, his snot-nosed behaviour, and I couldn't care anymore whether he'd blow himself up. I tried to regulate my breathing and told myself to calm down, that it was just the cabin fever fucking me over, but what had worked for five weeks simply didn't work anymore now. We should have gone up to the surface a week ago, and my nerves were frayed.

Paulo shot me a look of understanding over his shoulder from where he was working. He did know where my frustration was coming from; he had shared the same cabin thirty meters under sea level with Terence for the past... well, it seemed like forever. Sometimes I thought I'd never see the surface again and feel the sun on my skin. All I wanted was to go up, up, up. Away from all those tons of water pressing on me, away from the feeling that I couldn't breathe – that wet oxygen that I was providing for myself was driving me nuts. It was never enough, I was coughing my lungs out always, even in the pressure cabin. And there was the anxiety.

Always the anxiety, and it was steadily growing worse. I'd had fits before, but it was never as bad as it was right now. It was bad enough that it was consuming me and I couldn't stop myself. I tried to breathe deeply as I was trained to do, tried to think happy thoughts. The surface. Wild sex with Paulo once we'd be ashore. No more Terence around twentyfour-fucking-seven. Beer and sunlight. Haze. Partying. Whatever, as long as I didn't have to be down here anymore.

Blue used to be my favourite colour until my first full four weeks of cabining. After that first mission, I'd lost eye for the beauty of the world under water. And I'd definitely lost my taste for the colour of blue. Underwater, there was blue /everywhere/. And it was the wrong kind of blue, too. It was too cold, too confining, too much resembling /water/. And as three years passed and I fulfilled mission after mission successfully, the hate for blue was seeping into my bones. Hate turned into anxiety, and anxiety fueled my impatience to get the hell up again.

In the real world, I might have had no problems with Terence at all. I would've had a beer with him, I would've had a laugh with him. I used to think he was a swell guy. Until now. After five weeks of cabin fever and over-exposure to him I was just about to kill him, and I didn't doubt that those feelings were completely mutual. The tensions between us had to drive Paulo up the walls as well; he had to actually share the cabin with us.

It made matters even worse that I was supposed to be mentoring Terence. This was his third mission and he was getting cocky. His first two missions had been executed flawlessly and he thought he owned the world now. Wrong. He still forgot half of the procedures, he was not all that good with water and air manipulations, and he was reckless in his approaches to the situation. He wasn't all /that/ good. And after four weeks, after having told him this again and again, he had said that I should fuck off or he'd let the bomb explode on purpose. His (blue, of course) eyes glinted with a gleam of madness while he told me this.

So I told him to go on right away, because he was on the course to do just that.

He was the one manipulating the actual mine – Paulo was clearing off the parameters and I was busy setting up a forcefield based on hydrogen bridges to contain the actual blast. Terence had by far the hardest job, but that was part of the training system; at the end of the mission the trainee had to actually execute the dismantling. And I was supposed to coach him. I had tried to; honest to God I tried. The boy just wouldn't listen to any reason and I was so fed up, so frustrated... I didn't coach him anymore. I didn't correct him while I should've.

It only took me the better part of two seconds between my flare of temper and the moment to realize that I was doing something completely wrong. Two seconds before I realized that something truly horrible was about to occur. “No wait-...” I started, but by then Terence's anger-fueled manipulation had triggered something that shouldn't be triggered. And then it was too late.

Underwater mines are dangerous things. They're made of compartments and triggers, basically. Any motion triggers them and even though dismantling is done essentially without touching, our manipulations of water, air and metal – they do create some motion within the bomb mechanism. Of course there's a bit of error margin otherwise the creator of every bomb would blow himself up – and that's what we were using. When dismantling bombs/everything/ has to be done within the error margin.

Apparently Terence had some different ideas about safety margins than me. And the bomb.

I /saw/ it go wrong. Just the tiny little flash as the trigger mechanism was touched – the smallest of white sparks. That was all, before the explosion occurred one heartbeat later. And then I only had time to reinforce the hydrogen bridges closest to me. It was the strongest and fastest manipulation I'd ever done; creating a blue wall before myself that deflected most of the explosion.

There was a flash of light and my head slamming into something hard – a stab of pain that seemed to reverberate through my brain – and then nothing. Then it was over.

- When I woke up, Paulo and Terence were dead and I was in a hospital bed with the most blinding headache that I ever experienced. The lights were blinding silverwhite, like daggers in my head. Some nurse was hooking some sedatives onto an IV drip that was connected to my wrist and smiled at me. “Welcome back,” she said.

“My head,” I groaned. The world swam. I had problems focusing my vision onto anything nearby, and when I moved reflexively to hold my head, nausea bubbled up and I ended spewing all over the bed, embarrassingly enough. “Fuck,” I panted, glazing at the mess I made of my sheets. “Sorry, I'm so sorry.” Hot tears ran over my face as I squeezed my eyes shut, willing it to end.

“It's okay,” the nurse said. “You'll probably feel bad for a while, but we're going to make you all better.”

“And Paulo and Terence? Where are they?”

The nurse looked at me with sympathetic blue eyes and I knew enough. “You need to rest first,” she said.

The realization was mind-shattering. “Oh god, I killed them.” My fault. I should have done something, I should have said something. I had been the senior on the mission and I should have been coaching Terence in the dismantling, I should have corrected his approach. I should not have let my temper get the better of me. I shouldn't have been so stupid. My stupidity had killed my protegee and my lover.

Paulo. I pressed my hands against my eyes and ignored the migraine blooming in my brain; I cried my eyes out. What a horrible mess. It hurt to cry, but I couldn't help myself. I felt like I was popping veins but even if I'd cry myself an aneurysm, I couldn't care less at that moment. My one chance to perhaps a decent functional relationship at last and I'd let it blow sky high – all the way up to the water surface. It was all my fault.

“Please, you need to rest, you've just had a heavy operation,” the nurse insisted, but I ignored her. What did it matter?

Soon after, I lost consciousness. I suspect that she opened the sedative drip some further.

There were nightmares; visions of a future I had to face. Visions of a future that terrified me. Visions of Paulo blaming me with empty eyes and bits of brain and blood clotting his hair, of his family hunting me down like an animal. The worst one was a dream of Paulo's friends in the squad taking revenge on me, knocking me out and locking me up in a cabin far under sea level, my abilities chained away beneath crystal that left me unable to get out of there without drowning instantly – a cabin with windows to the blue. Blue forever and no way out, unless they would let me. And I knew that they never would. I woke up hysterically sobbing over that one.

More sedatives. People assuring me that it was alright. A doctor telling me that considering the circumstances they had operated me upon, I'd turned out nicely. He talked about nitrogen levels in my blood but it didn't really stick with me. There was someone who introduced himself as a grief councilor. A nurse frowning over a clipboard that held charts and readings about my physical condition. My parents. My brother. Once I thought I saw Paulo and I started screaming, but that turned out to be a dream, too.

- I woke up again, and there was somebody sitting at my bedside. It was Henry Jeune, my direct superior, and his face was grave. “Are you feeling better?” he asked. He looked like he had not slept in a week. His normally so healthily tanned face looked ashen and worried. Worried for me? He wasn't all that much older than I was, but he'd shot through the ranks where I'd gained a reputation of a rebel and someone who didn't handle authority. Neither did Henry, but he had solved it by becoming authority quickly, himself. Obviously, he was faring better by it than I did.

I shook my head at his sympathetic question. “No.” There was only one reason he could be here. My stomach clenched together with tension and I immediately hated myself for my weakness.

He folded his hands in his lap. “I wanted to make sure you're aware of the severity of the situation. You made a grave misjudgment down there with your handling of Terence Grady's behaviour. We lost two valuable recruits, three if you count yourself.”

His words stung. I blinked back unwanted tears. “Don't you think I know that?”

Jeune nodded. “There's been a commission that investigated the accident,” he said. “The verdict came in this morning. I'm here to inform you.”

I fought a flash of panic, not sure what I was afraid of. I didn't want to go back into the water, I didn't dare to face my teammates and my squad again, but getting fired and losing rank terrified me as well. I had always been so completely confident in my own abilities; I was damn good at what I did, until it all went to hell. To have that taken away from you, even when you had started to hate it more and more each day... that was tough. So I didn't say anything. I just nodded back, not trusting my voice.

“They should have gotten you three out of there at least a week earlier. With the pressure that was upon you three and the level of difficulty that you were running into down there, we should have picked you up earlier. You will be tried about your misjudgment concerning Terence Grady, but I can already assure you that what will happen will probably come down to not going on longer missions anymore, and not acting as a mentor.” He shrugged. “Which is something you won't be able to do anymore anyway.”

“What?”

“Oh. Didn't you know?”

My head was pounding in time with my heartbeat. “What?”

“You're declared unfit for duty for at least three months, after which your physical condition will be re-evaluated. But chances are small that you'll be able to resume your current work as you were doing so before. Your head will not withstand the pressure anymore, not after the blow it took. We're going to transfer you to the bomb squad.”

“The regular bomb squad?”

“Probably.”

I stared at my hands for a moment, trying to wrap my head around it. Through the blazing headache, I noticed something else deeper down inside of me. Panic. Regret. Grief. “I failed, didn't I?” I whispered, horrified to find tears in my eyes.

“We should have taken you guys up to the surface much earlier,” Jeune said sympathetically. He looked as if he were pitying me.

“That is no answer,” I said, balling my fists in my lap. “People have stayed down below for much longer than we did. People have worked under harder circumstances than we did. I just messed up, and now they're dead and it's all my fault.”

Jeune shrugged and rose from his sitting position. “Nothing I say can help you now, De La Meray. It's all up to you if you want to walk around with a guilt complex or just move on. Talk to the grief councilor if you must. All I can give you is the fact that you will not be held completely responsible for what happened and that you will resume your duty at the regular bomb squad once you get back from your medical leave.”

I recognized the authority in his voice and I responded to it immediately. “Yes sir.”

He left without looking back, leaving me alone with my everlasting new companion: my blinding headache.

It wasn't too long until I could walk around again and do stuff again. My headache was keeping me from doing much, though. Painkillers only helped for so long and they didn't want to give me too much lest I'd get addicted to them. So I walked around with lots of pain and zero concentration skills most of the time. I spent long days sleeping and either feeling sorry for myself or hating my bloody guts. In those days I made a few decisions: first of all, that I was not planning on returning back to the army /ever/ again. Even though I wouldn't have to go into the blue again, I couldn't stand facing the guys in the knowledge that I failed and caused the brutal death of two of their mates. I couldn't even stand being around myself.

I grieved for Paulo, I even felt sorry for Terence once in a while.

But mostly I hated myself.

After three weeks, they let me out of the hospital after I'd been stable for three days where it came to getting over my injuries. The blinding headache had mellowed out to a constant throb that I just couldn't seem to get rid of. The doctor told me that it'd either get better, or it wouldn't, and I just had to live with it. They'd been unable to operate on me immediately after the explosion because my body still had to be acclimated to the pressure and the oxygen levels on the surface, and that had apparently caused some permanent damage to my brain. “It could be lots worse,” the doctor told me. “Other people are reduced to drooling wrecks in your situation, you got off lightly with just a headache.” Asshole. What did he know about being unable to function properly because the pain tires you out so much? What did he know about painkillers not working anymore because you've taken them too much? Or ulcers, because of the same reason?

It was one of my roommates in the hospital who offered me the only helpful advice that anyone ever gave me in that goddamned hospital: chewing haze. On one of the few days we went for smokes together on the patio in the sun, he told me blithely that haze made all his problems go away. Apart from dulling his ever-present pain in his knee that had been shot to hell, it made him mellow, careless and happy, and he told me he'd cheerily spend the rest of his days like this. He felt better and he didn't have pain anymore.

Illegality and high prices didn't bother me. Once I got out of the hospital, I procured my own stash of haze and felt better instantly. Addiction be damned. Pain be damned. I bought a red car with an open roof and I toured the countryside, taking my time on my way to nowhere. Funds enough, time enough. I was on medical leave and my body was fucked up anyway.

And I wouldn't go back to the army again.

Not in the face of failure, not in the face of death.

Not with the memory of blue.

I'd tasted death and blueness and I didn't like it.
Now I would just celebrate being /alive/.

The rest of the world could shove it, as far as I was concerned.