~before~

He had buried her at the highest point of the archipelago. A lasgun had allowed him to carve her name into the rock nearby, and beneath hers, that of their children.

He took nothing of the place with him when he left.

All his thoughts were centered on outrunning the final blow. The only ember of happiness in a galaxy of pain and suffering and death had been snuffed out. Setting the course of the ship for an outbound vector, he pushed the blockade runner to its limits.

It was only narrowly that he avoided hitting the derelict cargo ship.

For a moment, curiousity overrode everything else. What was the ship doing out here, adrift and unclaimed" Possibly some escapee of the disaster"

It only took him a second to decide, and fifteen minutes later he had docked with the freighter.

He was shocked at what he found inside.

The crew gone, as if they had never existed. The entire ship reeked of bitter cinnamon, and it hadn't taken long to figure out why.

The cargo holds were full of the stuff. He had heard of the spice, a rather interesting commodity, regarded as some sort of drug by some, by others hailed as a miraculous substance. He had heard it described as a flaky, powdery substance in its purest, freshly harvested form...

...which is what he had found.

Curious, he had taken a generous pinch of it and placed it on his tongue.

At first, he had noticed nothing, save perhaps that the cinnamon taste was strong but very pleasant, seeming to spread over his tongue, a feeling of warmth that stole through him...

...followed by a wave of euphoria so intense that, for a moment, he was nearly frightened of it.

It was only the beginning. The amount he had ingested was a massive dose for someone that had never tried it before - generally, most would dip the tip of their finger into the stuff and rub it under the tongue.

It was the oddest sensation, at first, seeing himself walking to the blockade runner, into the cockpit, and accessing the controls to the new drive system, the 'space-folding' engines that they had been advised not to youse save in the most dire of circumstances.

Saw space shift and twist and swirl around him, arriving at a new world.

A world that called to him. A vision of white waves and deep, clear blue pools that he lost himself in, drifting along in the vision.

It was some time before he came to himself. As he did, he remembered everything else, all the ghosts of the past, the things he wished he could be rid of. A taste more of melange - more cautious, this time - found the euphoric feeling returning, the memory of those eyes.

He never dreamed he'd do just as his vision showed him. He had loaded as much of the spice as he could into the holds of the blockade runner, an exercise that took almost a week, constantly exposed to the geriatric drug as he hauled sacks of it, sometimes consuming it, losing himself in a vision of twisted space, a new place, a beautiful face he thought might be that of an angel.

He didn't notice at first that he was consuming more and more of the spice, putting it in his food, his drink. At first just every now and again, but then more and more, as it seemed to improve the taste of everything it touched.

Not until he noticed his eyes, on the sixth day.

Where there had been brilliant emerald, the eyes had changed. Colored. The green of his eyes had darkened, now a deep blue, like the endless ocean, the cornea around them likewise tinted. For a moment, it seemed, they had an almost luminous quality...

He came to the obvious conclusion - a side effect of consuming so much melange. But what did it matter, if the pain was dulled, if he had enough to last him the rest of his life?

He let the cargo ship go back to being adrift, leaving it behind, and, once more, ate a large amount of the melange.

The vision was the same as before - the controls, space contorting around him, the new planet...

...he didn't realize, at first, that in the fugue of his vision, he had not just seen the vision, but acted on it...