Ugh. Fuck (Despair had heard humans exclaim this and thought it sounded funny. With enough use, it became an unironic part of her vernacular).

They were mice. Ants, vying for territory on a tiny rock. They didn't care how many of themselves they killed so long as someone's lights stayed on at night. So long as everyone that was born lucky stayed lucky, and everyone that wasn't stayed in the mud.

There was no cooperation.

How could she believe in a species that seldom believed in itself?

Despair is flicking through memories now, each one tickling her senses in a sinister, black-fire way. She heard echoes of the

daddy mommy's in the bathtub!

past bouncing off the walls of her psyche, tremors sounding and

It is said that on the eve of battle, Dienekes was told by a native that the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows would block out the sun. Undaunted by this prospect, he remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade.'

resounding like shockwaves. (She shook her head at this Thermoplyae callback; it was senseless blood, like all wars.)

If she were human and had the breadth of wordly experience, Despair would compare the way the flashing memories slowed down to a slot machine or a roulette table.

One snippet of space-time won over all of the others, eventually.

Thirteen Kilotons

Despair had no idea where she was until she saw the kanji labeling everything on the busy street she'd been dropped to. She was in Japan. The street (the name of which she couldn't read, let alone find) was lively in an uncomfortable way. It was a not-yet-humid August morning, and groups of children milled through the streets, backpacks half their sizes as they trudged to school.

The cars told her she wasn't in present time; before the sixties at the very least.

Despair oriented herself and focused on the moment. Someone was about to have a shitty time; she'd know who when the moment came. Way further down the long street, the buildings began to get taller and thinner, fingers reaching towards the clouds.

A shudder raced through Despair's spine, a gasping tingle that made her stiffen her back and contort her face. Something awful was about to happen. And she could do nothing about it.

The gentle, steady breeze suddenly stopped, dropping the leaves it was carrying passenger. Birds stopped chirping, children stopped babbling, pedestrians stopped walking. But the moment felt silent. Weightless, like time and space was suspended withing a helium balloon. Despair knew how thin those balloons were.

Everyone was looking up.

Sound: humming. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Despair repeated the droning sound in her head before she noticed she was doing so. She stopped and identified the noise.

An airplane. It wasn't low-flying, but when Despair looked up and identified the blip in the sky, it was definitely too low to be performing any human idea of reconnaissance.

Despair watched with them. They all gazed for a long time as the vehicle made its slow crawl across the sky, displacing wispy morning clouds.

She was slow, almost too slow to realize that this was the moment. It had come.

They weren't too far from the point of the plane's decargo to watch the hatch open and dispense forth... something. Probably a bomb. They watched the object fall. Close enough to hear the devilish whistle of the bomb as it reached terminal velocity.

It disappeared behind the foliage of buildings.

United in terror, they watched the empty air now. There were confused whispers. Despair couldn't identify, but she could understand.

Why just the one?

They understood why when they heard Hiroshima break in two.

It only took three and a half seconds for the solid cloud and the destructive shockwave to overtake the street. The explosion itself was blinding, pulling a thick white bedsheet over the world and throwing it into the sun.

The entire city screamed all at once, and not one person had the chance to open their mouth. Everyone felt everything around them crumble without seeing any of it happen.

Despair felt ashes in her stomach. This would be a hard shift.

-----

The lucky ones were vaporized near the impact zone. She wished she'd been stationed there instead.

For three days on that long, narrow city street, Despair's presence was required. She helped children with broken bodies die of dehydration, radiation sickness, mercy by a crying parent or sibling.

She helped healthy individuals deteriorate as they wandered aimlessly through the thick fog that blanketed everything. Helped blisters and pus-bags break out on men and women, helped pregnant women have miscarriages and die during.

For four days afterward, she helped military doctors break the facts of dying family to stationed Japanese men.

She helped the soldiers end their lives once the news reached them.

She heard the quote from Oppenheimer on an American TV during a quick pick-up about a week later.

"I am become death, destroyer of worlds."

Someone finally spat it out, Despair thought.