But you made it close
He comes down over the coast, broken pieces of ice in the sea like shards of glass. The sun's shining on them but he's going fast, too fast, descending at a bad angle and banking as he tries to get Florence to loosen up, give him back control. The sun is shining on the ice but he plunges through the sky, moving parallel to the ground, and in a few minutes a cloud bank swallows him and visibility is nil. He has instruments and he can navigate by them, but visual has always been his primary tool when it comes to this kind of flying and without it it's hard to not panic. He grips the yoke and curses loudly. His knuckles are white, except where they're chapped and cracked and bleeding.
His body is coming apart. It has been for weeks. It doesn't matter now, because the goal is probably the same either way. Find Hobbes and now he's found him, and somewhere up in the stratosphere the asshole's own shuttle is plummeting, crippled, stabilizers bent beyond repair. He's never had a mid-air collision and this one wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it was bad enough to send them both down.
He shouldn't have pushed her so hard. She's falling apart just like he is.
The cloud bank parts in front of him but the air is still white, full of particles of white, and he realizes that he's in the middle of a snowfall and he laughs. It's so appropriate. He's not flying parallel anymore, he's descending at an angle, and as the ground rises up to meet him like a fist to the face he tries to believe that at least Hobbes will die too.
* * *
He thinks he is dead until his eyes open.
The world out the window is dark and still sheeted with white turned grey in the lack of light. The silence is complete and smothering, and there's something warm running into his eye, his real eye. He shifts in the safety harness, reaches up and his fingers come away slicked with red. There's more blood on a corner of the console, and it seems obvious what happened. Harness had done its job, but not completely.
He's alive.
Fuck.
He wrestles the harness loose and gets shakily to his feet. There's a sharp pain in his leg, might be from the bionic and it might not, and he doesn't have time or energy to find out. He stumbles out of the cockpit, making for the hatch, no coat, no extreme weather gear. Just his gun, and maybe he won't even have to use it. The hatch hisses open and he falls out into the snow with a grunt.
He thinks he might just lie there. The snow is soothing on his face, on skin burning blazingly hot from a metabolism run into the ground by the drug in his veins. It's soft and cool and he could just stay here, sleep, sleep forever. But a flash in the dimness catches his vision and he lifts his head.
Landing lights. Lights on a dark hulk a few yards away, outlining it. He shakes his head--it can't be--but it can't be anything else. Not in pieces on a glacier, not at the bottom of the ocean. Here, and right in front of him, and intact, though he has no idea if it would ever fly again.
Maybe it's not a conscious decision. Maybe it's something older, predator brain, reptile brain, that pushes him up and shoves him through the snow towards it. The sages of Old Earth would say that the human heart is bent on wild creation or mindless destruction.
Mike has chosen his side.