He did away with the mirrors on his ship, dulled every metal surface. He dimmed the ablution chamber lights, turned every holostill with his own face off, unable to stand his youthful visage staring back at him from within the aging snapshots.
But he knew, even without looking.
He knew how his body was broken.
He could feel it when the fabric of his uniform caught against the rough edged fissures in his chest as he turned, he could feel it in the ache of his leg in the cold, in the stiffness of his finger joints, broken again and again.
The centuries had taken its toll on him and carved his sins into his flesh.
He stood beneath the showerhead, letting the steady rumble of the water upon his antennae obliterate the sound of the world around him, leaving only the feel of his coron thrumming within his chest and the sight of his hands before him.
They had never been elegant things. Thick-digits with razor claws, they had been an instrument of pain ever since his hatching, kept carefully sheathed within the traditional metal tipped gloves of the vincam soldier. But their strength had been meant to protect. To guard. Not to… not…
He closed his eyes, feeling the water was over him, wishing it could wash away the blood he still felt congealing there, rotting somewhere beneath the plates of his chitin, somewhere he could never quite scrub it away.
Fetid, on the inside. A putrescent core, building up inside of him. Crack his chest and see it pour outwards, brackish and foul, the truth that he held within him, the truth carved into his body with every crack, every scar…
Every breath he still dared to take.
A monster. In looks and in deed.
He could feel the eyes of his cohort upon him, judging him for his deeds. He could feel her sea-green eyes crinkle in disgust, in pity, to look upon this thing that he had become. The wretchedness he had sunk to in their absence.
It didn’t matter that they were orders. He could have refused. He could have fought them, perished with his honor intact. But he hadn’t. Coward. Monster. He had to protect what little he had left. She waited for him, he knew, just outside of the chamber. Waiting for him to re-emerge clean and composed, returned properly from his mission, his hands and conscious clean as ever. She was just a hatchling. He couldn’t tell her. It wasn’t her burden. She didn’t have to know.
He shut off the stream of water, tried not to stare at it as it circled down the drain. Tried not to look for the stain that never left. Carefully, he covered each inch of his body — the undersuit first, then the pants and the shirt, gloves and over jacket, boots last of all, each crack and scar hidden beneath a swath of fabric, leaving only his face exposed.
His damage, hidden carefully away from her eyes. The ichor still curling heavily within his gut. He paused before the chamber door, putting on the carefully composed mask of the Elder last of all, and trapped the monster inside.