Discomfort | Judgement | Suspect
I feel a rush on me/ Come get these cuffs off me / Come get me out of my head/ And I’m stuck inside of what I see / These walls are blinding me/ Makes me crazy, I’m feeling uneasy
Uneasy – Rita Ora
Characters: Elder Kajj
Content Warnings: Light paranoia
Words: 438
For any other Vincam, the flotilla should have been a place to relax. It was the center of their colony after all, full of their own people, their own customs, and their own culture. It should have been comfortable, but Kajj found it impossible to rest here. He found danger in every shadow and threat at the corner of every smile.
How could he trust them?
How could he trust any of them?
To a certain extent, paranoia was part of his job description. It was his duty to seek out and recognize threats within their society and the smooth over tensions between those whose hands rested up on the wheel. He had been trained to pay careful attention to the tilt of antennae and the undertones of song, to listen to the words between the words and find the answers that rested within the silences. He knew their security systems inside and out, to the point where he could imagine feeling the pulse of it around him while he was upon the ships — maybe he could truly feel it, in the end. His implant had always had a strong connection to the systems here.
But he was also meant to trust the colony to have his best interests in mind. To trust that those in power knew what was best and was steering them towards the best possible future.
He had been alive far too long by now to believe that that was true. He knew too much. Had seen too much.
…participated in some of it, too.
He held himself apart, judging while still envying the easy comfort the rest of the colony seemed to share. He grit his teeth as food emerged from behind closed doors, unable to trust that it was clean and untampered. He twitched his antennae as drones shared whispered conversations in the hall, always suspecting them of conspiracy. He remembered a time when it all seemed to easy, so light. But he couldn’t concieve of a future where it could be so again.
The colony should have felt like protection, he should have slept easy with the mass of his people keeping watch while he took rest. Instead, it felt like a trap, with gleaming steel teeth lingering just out of sight, ready to snap closed. When would he walk into his warren to find blood smeared across the walls? When would the Star-bloom‘s systems “mysteriously” fail, leaving him to choke? His time here was spent pacing restlessly, eye darting towards every shadow.
He couldn’t trust them. He couldn’t trust any of them.
He should never have trusted them at all.