Chaos and the Aftermath [Page 2]

By J. Rolande, aka Moonlight Sonata 2004

Closing her eyes she becomes aware of physical feeling, her surroundings seeping into her. She feels the hard, cool floor under her shoulders and buttocks. She feels the pain throbbing away, creeping from her hand to her shoulder. She feels the sticky blood caking her shattered fingers. She feels the sharpness of dry, filtered air slicing up her nostrils with each inhalation. She tries to go beyond the physical act of feeling and touch her emotions, but they are intangible. Frustrated, she opens her eyes and happens to spy a bloodied contract she has fulfilled.

She frowns ever so slightly.

Samus Aran has never let her mind be infiltrated and nagged by the faces and voices of her victims; she takes the same attitude toward them as she does toward her sexual partners. They don't really have names or features. They are numbers to her, numbers preceded by dollar signs. They are not human bodies, but paper contracts with her signature on them, waiting to be fulfilled so she can collect her bounty. She has never allowed morals or ethics to infringe upon her livelihood, for when a bounty hunter goes soft, she can wave goodbye to her income. And this is more than a livelihood for Samus. It is the only life she knows how to live.

However, she now finds the need to pause and seriously ponder her life from all aspects, moral and ethical included. She considers her life from an outsider's perspective, drawing on the rumors and whispers she has heard about herself when people did not realize she walked among them. She knows she is not revered out of respect. People simply fear the armored personification of her, pictures of which grace intergalactic news feeds. She has recently destroyed the planet of Zebes, and with it, the mainstays of the Space Pirate forces that have threatened the galaxy for so long. For all intents and purposes she has saved the galaxy. Yet she is not viewed as a hero (or heroine; few know the lithe, muscled blonde who skulks among them is actually the feared bounty hunter). Crowds still part when she, in full armor, stalks the streets looking for her quarry. Her presence has the ability to make anyone in proximity to her feel like a potential target. Adults seek shelter from her wrath, and parents with children protectively shield them from the terror she represents.

She may have saved the galaxy, but she is still a bounty hunter first class, and one does not attain that ranking by being choosy about targets. She supposes that, in all fairness, she has earned the fear.

This is her life.

It is fact to her, plain and simple, and she has never before cared about the public reactions to her acts. Humans are fickle creatures anyway; one moment they want to canonize, the next, burn at the stake. She finds it best to not form attachments anyway. Anyone she becomes attached to could wind up a target. Simply put, to attach to Samus Aran is to risk one's life. It does not matter if one is friend or foe, male or female, young or old. Once the terms of a hunt are agreed upon and the contract signed, the target is no longer a person-he or she is just that, a living, breathing target that has numbered days until it stops living and breathing.

She smirks, bemused. No wonder parents hide their children when she passes. They would rather sacrifice themselves than leave their flesh and blood to fall at the Hunter's feet.

This sheer irony makes her want to laugh and cry at the same time. She winds up in a fit of giggles and hiccups while tears stream from her eyes. It is just too much: she, whose wrath is terrible, whose ethics are nonexistent, she, whom parents fear, is to be a parent herself. She, Samus Aran, a mother. Already the cells within her uterus are undergoing mitosis. Her nameless partner's sperm has fertilized the egg and conception has occurred. Soon a tiny, perfect heart will begin to beat, and tiny hands and feet, with miniature fingers and toes, will reach out in the amniotic fluid. Within months she will feel tiny legs kicking at her from the inside out, and in the ninth month, she will deliver the child.

No... not the child. Her child.

Will it be a boy or a girl? She imagines pink one-piece outfits, or blue miniature t-shirts, pacifiers and bottles, gallons of formula, and an infinite amount of diapers. She opens her eyes and looks around again, assessing her surroundings. Can all the endless supplies of baby paraphernalia fit on her sparsely furnished hunter-class gunship? Try as she might she can not picture any space for a bassinet or crib in her already cramped habitation quarters. Her eyes take in the bloody chaos again, and a pain worse than that in her hand begins to well up in her heart.

There is simply no way she can raise a child under these conditions. Her gunship was built for speed and stealth and matters of sheer necessity. Comfort is a luxury, not a necessary need. She could make due with this for the nine months of gestation, but what about after the baby is born? The ship was built for need, after all, and for a bounty hunter such as herself, children simply aren't a necessity.

A lump swells in her throat, choking her. She sits up, still clutching her broken hand to her chest, and stares at the sheer amount of paperwork strewn about the floor. Even though she has the files safely in her ship's computer, she likes to have hard copies in the event of a system crash, a virus, or a hacker. While her technology is always up to date, one can never be too prepared for a worst-case scenario. The paper that now surrounds her, crumpled, bloody, in some cases torn, represents lives she has taken. Not only that, it represents lives she has taken payment for taking! The enormity of what she does for a living is slowly becoming a reality. Yes, it is fine for her, but could she in good conscience raise a child in these conditions, with this career?

For the first time in... well, she does not know how long, Samus Aran allows her conscience to become an integral part of her psychology. The fact she remains detached from a conscience allows her to be lethal, and her lethality in turn is what allows her to be such an effective, and hence well-paid, bounty hunter. She has never considered herself as needing a conscience, let alone a good one. But now a tiny, innocent life grows slowly but steadily within her womb. This life has never seen evil. This life has never felt the pangs of moral quandaries. This life has not seen the ill that plagues the galaxies. This life is new and fresh and filled with hope, everything Samus Aran's life is not. She hunts the corrupt, but is not above corruption herself. She is aging and disintegrating as slowly, but as surely as the embryo within her grows. She also, until now, held no hope for her redemption.

This throws a further irony into sharp relief: the taker of life will soon bring one into existence.