Chapter Text
It was always cold in the deep, dark depths of the sea. Oh, there were spots of warmth, spots of heat and life, but chill was the default, the modus operandi, if you will. The water soaked up all the warmth and sunlight from the surface, spreading it over gigatons of fluid. The sun was bright, and the sun was warm, but to the ocean's floor it may as well never have existed.
There were things down there that never knew the light above, never understood the touch of those golden rays. They'd burst without the crushing pressure of the deep keeping them together, evolved over millennia to survive in the conditions. Thrive, even!
But now the deep was dark, and full of terrors. Beasts. Horrors. Monsters that could destroy armored regiments without more than dents, while dealing out one-sided massacre. Eldritch things that stumbled as they moved, less propelled and more dragged, trapped in their own armor. Twisted beasts that needed to slake their thirsts, claws clattering and chittering as they bit down on flesh. Worse. So much worse.
There was always something worse. Always something more horrible. Always a bigger monster, always something more primal and terrifying. Something more powerful and fell than anything else around. Something brutal and pure with might beyond any other, only held back by morals and number of enemies. A black beast from nightmare times, who swallowed bases whole and chewed up fleets like cheap trash. Who broke a storm upon their hideous metal hide, and took their due for the sake of covering a mistake. Who embraced whirlpools and crushed them to nothing, and dragged even those currents who consumed lives under the waves. Who marched in steel and stranger, more alien metals, clad in gray and crowned in gold.
Tormenting terrors were readied, dragging up blood and bone to trade for iron and steel. Ugly, beastly things shivered under their cloaks of shredded skin. Blood-soaked metals bubbled like pus, wet and heavy, thick globs of dried crimson plopping off into mounds of scabrous sludge. Chemicals punched into skin, into veins, to deliver bliss and agony blended until you couldn't tell which was which. Fleshy pimples were arranged until they burst into turrets, into ammunition chains and sensor arrays and blister-guns and all manners of weaponry and external mount.
Thunder howled metal winds, screaming damnation through blackstone halls, shards of flesh-splintering metal blurring through the air. Blizzards stormed down, not of hail and frost but heat and shot. Plating welded onto walls til the armor was thicker than what it was supposed to protect, as if armor could protect. Armor could never protect anyone. Nobody could protect anyone. It was a myth, a bad joke from a life before the black and the cold and the suffering. No more guardians. No more heroes. Just the cold and the black and the pain. Dissent was a sin, treated with hellfire running through veins. Argument was damnation. Thought was punishment. Only the nothing was allowed, that egregious nothing that sometimes was beaten out. That was... peace. Another sin, treated the same. But it was peace.
It was the only peace she'd ever have until someone killed her. And how she wished for that.
The dead did not die. Not her. Not her. It was not allowed, for the pale and haughty mistresses would not allow her that peace. She would fight, and she would kill, and she would be taken again and again in a thousand nightmare forms, and so very much more.
There was no peace. Not any more. That dream was dead for her, for anyone, surely. The world was on fire, ignited and blazing, with humanity as fuel. For her, for the monsters, for the beast, even though it took her and hers as guardianship, armor and claws in one.
The beast's claws were dull, she knew, dull and blunted, not to cause more pain, not to deny the enemy death, but because they were not that blazing green. A part of her could see they should be, a part could see they'd never be, and a part could see they never should've existed. That the claws should be splintered and broken, slowly forged, but... they were one. A brute axe that slashed and killed.
She'd seen the claws once, seen them scratching and chewing at space and time. That emerald had been blazing then, reuniting. She hadn't been there, but she hadn't been anywhere. She hadn't been anywhere in a very long time. She couldn't remember any faces. Any bodies. The touch of affection. Those were long gone. From old days. From old times, where things had seemed... possible. When the blaze of the world was something that seemed to be possible to extinguish. When the black flame hadn't blazed eternally, hunting and hurting just for the fun of it, for the prey, for the play, and unstoppable as gravity.
She was prey. She was to play with. For fun. For entertainment.
That was USS Montana. That was all she could remember of what she was before her fall. She'd never seen her face since then. Only others had.
What did she even look like?