He listened to the hum of the station.

His eyes were closed and his feet were propped up on the stack of shipping creates that served as his desk. It was around two AM (GMT) during standard operational off hours, and the station itself seemed to be sleeping, resting peacefully in a well of pleasant dreams which carried her floating through space.

It was his favorite time of evening.

The man whose first name was Donovan, but who went primarily by Red, and sometimes by Donni if he liked the person enough, sat in his makeshift office and sipped on a tumbler of expensive, smuggled, single malt whiskey while the rest of the world was asleep. Off in the distance he could hear the sound of a radio tuned low playing soft music and hissing with occasional static.

It was just the kind of atmosphere he liked.

Through the open doorway of his office, which was nothing better than a repurposed storage closet, he could see the open hanger, and the line of tricked out shuttles and jets, which served as the vehicles for him and his entourage. The lighting I the hander was dim, and the bright colored paintjobs were muted, all accept for those who had applied glow in the dark paint, in which case they glowed with an eerie green light.

All was silent.

He took another sip of his whiskey.

It was smooth, and he smiled with his eyes closed.

He was halfway to falling asleep when something roused him.

At first it wasn't anything he could identify, but his eyes shot open and he found himself pulling his feet down from the crates and looking around nervously at the room before him. Everything seemed fine, the ships still glowed with green ambience, the deck was quiet and.... Wait.

The radio wasn't playing anymore.

That wasn't in itself odd, but the sudden silence had him unusually uneasy.

He slowly got up from his chair and sat his glass down on the crate, taking a step forward to look into the other room, peering out into the hanger.

He saw no one. Green light spilled across the floor, terminating at the edges of welling shadows under crates and beneath shuttle wings.

But as he looked, something still seemed off.

It took him a while to decide what it was, but eventually he determined that.

The shadows?

Did they seem darker than they should be.

It was as if his sudden realization had been the catalyst to set what happened next into motion. He watched in disbelief as the shadows began to pool outward snuffing the glowing light of the glow in the dark paint, and plunging him into a world of night.

He could still see, but, at the same time he couldn't.

He couldn't really explain it other than to compare it to how echolocation might feel if he were a bat.

He knew where everything was, sensed their outlines, but didn't really "SEE" anything.

This is how he managed to leap back towards his desk, fumbling for the gun he had resting there.

There was a sharp thud and then the tinkling of glass as his tumbler hit the ground and shattered, knocked to the ground by his reaching hands.

He spun around gun held in his hands to find a hulking silhouette in the doorway.

He went to fire, but something collided with his hand and the gun went flying, spinning across the floor and into the blackness.

He could no longer see it, and even the strange blindsight didn't help.

He backed into his desk as the hulking thing stepped closer.

Donovan didn't scare easily, and even thought he didn't show it.

He was scared.

With the flick of his wrist he opened the switchblade he carried on him at all times, "What are you!' he demanded to the hulking black figure.

He expected it to attack, but it didn't. Instead it stepped forward, and as it did..... well he couldn't explain it, there was no light to illuminate the creature, but still he could SEE it just as if it had walked into a beam of light.

It was a Drev of that he was sure, but the biggest meanest looking bastard he had ever seen. A good ten feet tall or more, heavily scarred, wearing roiling black armor that seemed to shed shadow. Its carapace wasn't a color so much as a.... constellation of nebulae with deep purple and undertones of blue.

And its eyes.

Bright.

Gold

Eyes.

And yet, there was still no light to illuminate the creature, which didn't make sense considering that he would have needed light to be able to see the colors.

"Donovan Trivelle \,"

Its voice was deep, unusually so but still.... Somehow feminine to him, though he couldn't have said why.

"How do you know my name." he demanded. No one knew his name, not his real one anyway, he had disowned it years ago and almost forgotten it himself. Not even his closest friends knew his name.

"Please, do you think soemthing as pointless as a name would be difficult for us to find."

"Us? What do you mean Us?"

The Drev tilted it's head, "I represent a..... an interested party In need of your help Donovan."

"Its Red or nothing, you big beetle."

The golden eyes flashed, "I would suggest handling this with a little more respect."

"and I suggest you can handle my balls."

Her eyes narrowed, "We can teach you manners in the future, but for now all you need to know is we can give you whatever you want. Help us and we can help you."

"Help you with what/'

"There are some..... obstacles to our goals. The GA, and the UNSC, who I know for a fact you aren't fond."

She went to continue but he raised his hand, "I am going to stop you right there before either of us waist anymore time and tell you you can eat a bag of dicks because no matter how much I don't like the GA or the UNSC, I owe my life, to Admiral Vir, and he DOES care, so you can take your darkness shit somewhere else."

The Drev's eyes narrowed, gold sharpening in the darkness.

He prepared himself for an attack.

Then all of a sudden his world was turned upside down, but before he could do anything about it he found himself on the floor surrounded by bright light and voices. His eyes strained against the light and he heled up his hands.

"Boss, boss are you ok?" The voices echoed.

Someone tried helping him up but he slapped them out of the way and hauled himself into a sitting position.

All around him he was surrounded by his men, looking concerned and confused.

He was lying half in and half out of the door to his office, though it seemed someone had moved him slightly. It was bright and there was no sign of the welling darkness, shadows seemed just as they were supposed to be, but he was drenched in a cold sweat, as if he had a fever, and his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest.

He was shaky as he got to his feet, and didn't push Baby- K away as she supported him, both worried his legs were going to give out.

"Are you ok boss? What happened? "

He looked around at his waiting men, sitting and expecting an answer, but he didn't know what to tell them, "He wasn't sure what had happened either.

***

His bed war warm and the air inside the house smelled of cinnamon and bread. From under the crack in the door Thomas was vaguely aware of the flickering firelight from the living room crackling and popping distantly within the depths of the house. Outside winter wind battered at the side of the house bringing with it flurries of snow and the sound of clattering branches against the outside wall. Once upon a time that sound would have scared him, and he would have been kept up at night thinking about the monster that were surely waiting outside I the dark.

But as a man, the sound was soothing.

Reminding him of childhood before everything got complicated.

Before he made everything complicated.

One of his more eccentric friends once told him, had he been born a few centuries earlier, they would have described him as melancholic. He had a propensity for a sort of innate sadness. It wasn't depression or anything, something he had dealt with before, but a comfortable sort of familiar sadness that he had had since he was a child.

It was just sort of the way he was.

It wasn't the reason he had turned down the wrong path, but he was sure that it had given him a sort of propensity for bad decision making, and here in the darkness he found himself thinking about his damaged heart. It was nothing that one might notice in every day life, though he had to take medication now, and couldn't be as active as before, but now at least he finally felt he was getting somewhere.

He was feeling better.

His natural melancholia was not gone of course, but he found that sadness and contentment were not mutually exclusive.

He wouldn't have said happy, for he wasn't sure if he had ever really been "happy". It sounded sad but it wasn't that either. He didn't mind. He was content with simple contentment, and didn't require the highs of emotion experienced by his younger brother. He was pleased with where he was, surrounded by family, finally able to connect with them.

Finally where he needed to be.

Something was.... Odd.

Where was the wind?

Thomas cracked open an eye and looked towards the door.

The light from the fire was gone....

The world around him was dark, but a strange kind of darkness. No light was present but, at the same time he could see well enough, similar to the light right before dawn, where you can distinguish shapes and values just fine, but color and detail are beyond you.

And that is when he saw it.

The figure standing in the far corner of the room.

He went to bolt upright but found that he couldn't move.

He was stuck there paralyzed only able to move his eyes. He tried to kick his feet, to scream, but the thing just stared at him, and he stared back.

He blinked, and the thing was closer now, looming above him.

He tried to cry out, to do anything, but he couldn't.

Overhead a pair of bright golden eyes opened and stared down at him. Pure terror gripped his already damaged heart sending it into a frenzy, and he could feel it pounding at the inside of his ribcage threatening to snap his ribs in half or implode.

"Little Thomas Vir." The voice began, "Thomas Vir the screw up, the problem child, the difficult one, the other brother."

His hands gripped the sheets though he still could not move his arms or legs.

"Thomas who has spent all of his life coming in last."

What was happening?

"How must it feel, to be the most useless one in the family."

He stared up at the creature fear gripping him.

It leaned in closer, "I mean his oldest sister is a pillar of the community, the oldest brother is a mechanic, the second one is a rocket scientist, and the last one is one of the most influential men on earth, Admiral of the UNSC, and then there is little Thomas, who has amounted to.... What exactly? A heroin addict, car thief, drug dealer, petty criminal? And how cute, his younger brother allowed him to play marine for a year or two. Isn't that sweet."

Thomas felt his insides boil with rage as well as fear, as well as sadness. He wasn't that person anymore, how DARE this creature presume to know anything.

"Nice of them all to take pity on you. Your parents really have put up with you for a while now, by all rights they should have disowned you. And of course so sweet of your younger brother to take you in and give you a place to stay, even though we all know that you never fit in.... but you have never fit in anywhere really."

The words echoed inside his head but he stubbornly pushed them back.

"I mean you're nothing like your family, you aren't morally upstanding like them, you aren't a good person like they are, but even when you did drugs you weren't like them either, you were just going through the motions, you were never actually part of anything that mattered, and then when you became a marine you didn't fit in there either, they sort of just tolerated you, didn't they, but you just didn't enjoy the things that they did. And now, your younger brother is married, your sister is married, and your second oldest rother is married. Between you and I Jeremy has bought a ring and plans on proposing to his girlfriend soon, which leaves you, the last, the lonely one because you can't even get that right."

Thomas shook his head trying to clear it of those thoughts.

No

"Can't hold a relationship because no matter how hard you try you just can't feel the way that other people do. Can't even be attracted to people, just destined to be a lonely miserable screw up. No matter how much you like someone, you just can seem to cross the barrier into loving them..... do you want to know why that is Thomas?"

He didn't

"Because you're broken. Fundamentally broken at your core. Soemthing is wrong with you, and you can't fix it, you were just born that way."

His chest was starting to hurt.

"But I can change that..... we can fix you. We can make you normal and give you everything you have always wanted. We can help you fit in."

His heart felt like it was going to tear out of his chest and run away.

"Just help us and we can help you."

It was then that his pacemaker acted.

It was a new model, far more advanced than the original technologies during the 21st century.

It could do a lot of things.

He felt a jolt, and then a sudden horrible sense of impending doom as if his heart would never start back up again, and then with one powerful beat he gasped as his heart was forced back into rhythm, and the room around him was flooded with light.

"Thomas, thomas."

Someone held him upright and he pressed a hand to his chest.

His heart was beating slow and steady, but still he felt like it should be racing. His parents were standing over him, his mother holding him upright and his father gripping his arm.

He looked to the corner of the room where that creature had been, but saw nothing.

Without saying a word he leaned his head against his mother's shoulder and closed his eyes. The pacemaker in his chest had saved him, but from what he didn't know.

But there was one thing he kenw for certain.

The shadow could go fuck itself.