For Emily

Grief

"Get in!" I yell to my daughter as I climb into our 177 foot cyclops. The alarms blare around us and the hull of the ship starts to buckle under pressure. The roars of the giant beast surround us. One more hit and we're dead.

"I'm trying!" She yells back, trying to climb into the ship, "my leg is caught!" She shouts, pointing to her leg, which is covered by the wreckage. I run to help her, but the roars become louder than ever, filling my mind and ringing in my ears and I see it swim up behind her. My face goes pale and my heart stops.

"EMILY!" I yell at the top of my lungs, pulling with all I've got.

"Don't let go! Dad...!" she sobs. I pull until my fingers are numb, but I feel her slip away from me as I see the 180 foot leviathan envelop her. Every instinct in my body tells me to go after her, even though I know she's gone and trying to save her now would only get me killed. My mind goes blank and I go completely into fight or flight response. I bolt to the engine and put the speed on full blast. I drive in the opposite direction until I see sunlight.

-ONE MONTH LATER-

I bolt upright out of bed, gasping for breath. My heart pounds out of my chest and sweat pours off of my forehead. Shit. Another nightmare. Again. Yesterday marked a month since I lost my baby girl. Every time I close my eyes I can still see the look of sheer terror on her face. She needed me to protect her, to save her, and I let her down. A parent's job is to keep their kids safe at all costs. I shouldn't even be here right now, it should've been me that the Reaper got. There's not even any alcohol on this stupid planet to numb the pain.

"Ugh," I groan, dragging myself out of bed. My eye catches the "Keep calm" poster Emily and I found on the Aurora.

"Quit mocking me," I mumble angrily at it and head down to the bottom floor of my base.

After I lost Emily, I decided on staying near the surface until I could gather up enough courage to dive down deep again. I know staying up here in one place won't do anything to get me off of this planet, but sometimes I wonder if escaping would even be worth it. Say by some miracle I do find a way to get back home, what's waiting for me when I get back? An empty house and a hell of a lot of grief. I lost my wife in a car crash when Emily was just a kid, and I guess Em was all that kept me going after that. Now that she's gone, I have to fight off the feeling to swim right outside of this base and just let myself run out of oxygen. Then this whole nightmare would be over.

Sometimes thinking about her makes me so sick to my stomach with grief that I have to stop myself. A lot of the time I think of her when she was 6 years old, just learning to ride her new bike I got her for Christmas. She learned it really quick, she was always a quick learner. Once she was a ways off though, I think she forgot how to ride without my help and fell and scraped her knee. She was howling like a wolf.

-Flashback!!!-

"Daddy!!! It hurts!" She cries.

"It's alright, pumpkin," I reassure her in a calm voice, picking her up and carrying her into the house to clean up her knee.

"You're tough, right? Be daddy's tough little girl," I say, making a mean, tough face. She makes a determined face back.

"Yeah," she says through subsiding tears, "I'm gonna be strong and tough, just like you!"

"That's my girl!" I smile, kissing her on the forehead.

-End of flashback!-

I always knew she was destined for great things. She was just about as perfect as perfect could get. She was the smartest person I knew, tough, driven, passionate, you name it. When she went off to college, I was devastated. But she ended up getting her degree in aerospace engineering and I couldn't have been prouder. She joined the company I worked for, Alterra, because she decided she wanted to be on the crew that built the phasegate on an alien planet. Before you knew it, we were working together to make a trip to this undiscovered planet. I was thrilled about all of this at first, until the Aurora crashed. Only us and a few other people on the ship survived, but they were all eventually killed, either by a sea monster, or one of the other million ways you can die on this planet. So now it's just me. Seeing as how everyone else got picked off one by one, chances are I'll probably be the next to go. I don't have much hope anyway. PDA says chances of survival are incredibly unlikely, and I agree with her. All odds are against me. Rescue can't come because the last ship that tried to rescue us, Sunbeam, got shot down by that huge alien-gun-thingy. The Aurora is wrecked, everything wants to kill me, and I'm alone on an ocean planet with no way to escape. Great.

In the back of my mind, I remember something Emily said to me when I first lost my wife.

-FLASHBACK!-

Emily comes in when I'm sitting in my office, drinking a glass of my strongest whiskey.

"Daddy, can we go get ice cream?" She asks in a soft voice.

"Oh no, not now, baby. I'm too exhausted." We had just had my wife's funeral a couple of days ago and I had shut myself in my office ever since, drinking my pain away.

"But that's what you said last time," she pouts.

"I'm sorry, hon. I know all of this is hard for you to understand, but losing your mom has been really hard on me."

She walks up to me and takes my hand, which looks huge in comparison to her tiny little one.

"It's okay, Daddy. I miss Mommy too, but at least we still have each other. We can be strong for each other."

-End of flashback!!-

Em was too young to understand what death was at the time, so I don't think she fully understood what her mom dying meant until she got older. I think somehow though, she knew she was the only thing keeping me going, even though she couldn't have possibly understood my grief at such a young age. I think that's the reason she was always such an overachiever with everything she did, so that I would be proud of her. So I would have a reason to get up in the morning, so that I would have something to look forward to. She was so strong for me. If she was in my place, she wouldn't give up so easily. She would fight because she was doing it for me. So that's what I'll do. I'll keep on fighting until I escape this planet, or die trying.

For Emily.

End of Chapter One.

Hey guys! What do you think of my new story? I know I haven't updated my other one, All Roads Lead to You, in like forever. I'm kinda (really) stuck, but I'll get it updated eventually! I just got this idea for a Subnautica story since I've been obsessed with it lately. Also, I want to shout out my best friend Miraculous Puppy because she helped me figure out what I wanted to do with some parts of this chapter, especially the ending. Go check out her new story called Home!