[Carl-Quest POV]
There was a time when the crunch of a collapsing windpipe was music to my ears. A time when the panicked, gurgling gasps of dying children was one of the few things that made the deafening silence of the cosmos remotely bearable.
But as I wrapped my prosthetic metal hand around the boy's collar, I watched in pity as he struggled to gulp for air. It was there where I realized just how much I had changed. I couldn't feel that old joy anymore.
"He has me," I rumbled softly. Even to my own ears, my voice sounded like grinding gravel.
Grand Regent Thragg's eyes narrowed into slits of venomous, aristocratic annoyance. He stared me down for a few seconds until he realized I was dead serious. Perhaps out of mercy for his lineage, he let go of Mark, . Mark staggered backward from certain death, gasping violently and hacking up thick globs of blood in a total panic.
I didn't bother looking at Thragg and kept my single good eye fixed on the terrified kid.
"Take a steady breath, son," I told Mark, keeping my tone as gentle as my ruined vocal cords could manage. "Go on back and check on your pops. Get outta here now. I'll handle this fella. Go!"
Mark nodded dumbly. His chest heaved as his bloodshot eyes went wide with a cocktail of terror and utter bewilderment. Without another word, he shot down toward the dirt, flying desperately toward the distant farm.
Thragg's pristine cape whipped like a gunshot in the wind. He immediately lunged forward to cut off the kid's escape route, but I stepped smoothly right into his goddamn path.
"Not if I can help it, buddy."
Thragg stopped dead in his tracks. For the first time in a thousand years, he really looked at me. He looked at the faded olive-green baseball cap, the soft white undershirt stretching over my chest, the blue plaid flannel, and the heavily worn cargo pants.
"What is the meaning of this betrayal, Conquest?" Thragg hissed.
The air temperature plummeted around us, a freezing chill radiating from his skin as his killing intent flared. "Have you finally gone senile? Not only did you fail your mission, but now I am seeing you wear the pathetic rags of these insects."
I just reached up with my metal hand and calmly adjusted the brim of my fish cap.
"It's Carl now," I corrected him, my voice perfectly steady. "My gal... she gave me that name. It means a whole awful lot to me, Regent."
Thragg's expression quickly changed from disgusted to enraged.
Woosh-Boom
He was faster than sound, faster than thought. Before I could even blink, his hands clamped violently around the delicate internal joints of my metal arm. With anear-piercing screech of tearing alloy and snapping synthetic tendons, Thragg brutally ripped the heavy prosthesis clean off my shoulder.
Sparks showered over my flannel. He spun on his heel, swinging my own severed metal arm like a baseball bat and aiming the heavy steel directly for my temple.
***
When I first opened my eyes in that white captivity cell over six months ago, I didn't even know what I was.
My senses were failing. My right arm was a butchered, leaking stump, and my equilibrium was gone. But worse than any physical agony was the realization that my soul felt like it had been violently scooped out of my chest.
The centuries of bloodlust, the blind loyalty to the Empire, the millennia of unhinged slaughter it was all just gone. It left behind a gaping, hollow hole in my chest, offering no answers no matter how hard I clawed at it.
The only memory that remained in the echoing cavern of my severed soul was a projection. It was a towering but calming figure in blue and red, floating high above a beautiful green and blue sphere, looking down at a planet and simply saying: I love you.
Someone had tossed me into a secure rehabilitation room that could double as a tourture chamber. But My warden wasn't some tough-as-nails brute as I had expected It was Britney. She was a tough-on-the-outside but soft-on-the-inside kinda gal, the exact kind of anchor I never knew I desperately needed.
At first, it was just a grueling physical recovery. But slowly and surely, she started showing me the world. She taught me how to properly plant a vegetable garden without my dense fingers crushing the seeds. She showed me how to drink coffee on a wooden porch while the sun came up, instead of searching the horizon for something to kill.
And as I slowly, completely fell in love with humanity and this fragile, beautiful little planet, I realized something even more miraculous.
She was falling in love with me, too.
***
My nostalgic thoughts were violently interrupted, because Thragg didn't give a single, flying fuck about love or rehabilitation. He only cared about the Viltrumite doctrine.
The kinetic impact of my own metal arm smashing into my jaw hit with the force of a detonating asteroid. It felt like he wanted to blast me back to Viltrum and pay for my crimes there.
I didn't even have time to brace myself before the atmosphere ignited into white-hot plasma around my skin. I instantly flew past Earth's atmospheric layers, rocketing straight up through the clouds and into the cold, unforgiving and suffocating void of space.
Seconds later, I crashed and cratered onto the surface of the Moon.
Lunar dust exploded upward in a massive, silent plume, raining down slowly in the zero-gravity vacuum. My skull rang. My vision swam. But before I could even push my shattered body out of the crushed rock, Thragg was already there.
He descended upon me like a white-hot missile, driving his heavy boots directly into my chest.
***
Three months ago. There was a turning point.
I was standing in the narrow hallway of our small suburban home, awkwardly holding a plastic basket of freshly folded laundry. Britney was in the kitchen, arguing on the phone with Cecil Stedman.
"I'm telling you, it's working," she had whispered fiercely into the receiver, completely unaware that I could hear her racing heartbeat from the other room. "You were right. Normal domestic life... it's somehow enough to tame the Viltrumites."
That word.
Viltrumites.
It was like a rusty key turning in a blood-soaked lock. The floodgates blew wide open, and centuries of relentless slaughter crashed back into my brain.
Oceans of blood. Ripping the spines out of screaming heroes. Bathing in the steaming guts of entire alien races and laughing as their planets burned to ash.
The grotesque, sickening memories left me with disgust, shame, nausea, and other feelings that I couldn't process. The contrast between the butcher I was and the man holding a basket of warm laundry was just too much. I dropped the basket, collapsing to the hardwood floor as I screamed, clutching my head and drowning in the suffocating weight of my own sins.
I was a genocidal madman. I was a fucking monster.
Britney dropped the phone. She didn't run away and she didn't call Cecil for backup. She just fell to her knees, wrapped her arms tightly around my trembling shoulders, and held me as I wept like a broken child.
"That wasn't you," she had whispered fiercely, pressing her warm lips to my scarred forehead to anchor me to the present. She spoke to me like she had seen the memories too."That was Conquest. You are Carl... my Carl."
[A/N]:
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