The one sound Fynock least expects to hear is a laugh. He looks at his situation, and he can picture hearing wildlife, birds cooing and cawing and chirping to one another mid flight; maybe small rodents and forest creatures skittering about through the underbrush; the sound of the soldier’s leg dragging every here and there with the dead weight its injury provides. He doesn’t expect to hear the soldier laugh. So when he does, Fynock stops sauntering along and looks back at the man behind him with curiosity and a bit of surprise.
The curiosity is replaced with annoyance — if he had wanted to triumphantly smile at cracking the rough and tough facade of the grounder, he didn’t have time to do so. Old man knew just how to get under his skin, it seemed.
“If you must know, I wasn’t really in any hurry to get to D’Qar, so I might have maybe just plugged in the coordinates…set it to autopilot…and, y’know…” He shrugs sheepishly, feeling color rising to his cheeks as he realizes this truth in no way proves that he’s a good pilot — if anything it will most likely show the ground trooper that he is a sloppy one — but Fynock knows his piloting skill is second to absolute none. He just got a bit skittish, thinking about what could be waiting for him on D’Qar, so he decided to take it easy on himself, relax and meditate, calm his nerves.
“I fell asleep. Alright?”
He whirls around and kicks at a pebble, letting a bitter emotion display itself openly for the first time as the stone goes soaring through the air and collides in a loud thwack with the bark of the nearest gnarled tree. “I trusted Edgehawk back there to get me to D’Qar…” he scoffs, turning back to face the soldier once more, all signs of conflict and distress removed from his demeanor as quickly as they’d come — no use dwelling over past mistakes. So he turns his back on the soldier and starts to walk once more. “I knew I should have taken the ETA…” he calls over his shoulder, a thought more to himself than the trooper. “Yeah…she definitely would have landed me on D’Qar, easy as shit…just doesn’t feel right flying her with my ‘mech unfinished and all, y’know…?”
This time, it’s the soldier’s turn to pause in his tracks, weight shifted forward onto his uninjured leg.
“Y’fell asleep?” he echoes, the disbelief that doesn’t make it onto his face seeping into his voice. For a brief flicker of a moment the lieutenant is torn, feeling for the first time in who fucking knows how long like he doesn’t know how to react. There’s something about this that’s weirdly — very, very weirdly — ...endearing? For fuck’s sake, he doesn’t know what to call it. All he knows is that this complete stranger is spilling his damn guts about something that is, in all honestly, pretty fucking embarrassing, in the middle of the blasted woods. There’s something about the pilot’s reaction, the raw frustration that appears like the sudden flash of a blaster muzzle only to be smoothed over as quickly as it comes, that betrays youth and inexperience. He doesn’t know who this guy is, but he’s smart enough to put two and two together — the reaction to learning that D’Qar had been overrun, the apparent relief at finding the new Resistance base, this..familiar little penchant for exposing some visceral emotion only to mask it over with a bullshit grin.
Seems the past few days have been a shitshow for the both of them. Though, one of them does have an injured leg that he has to stumble along with like it’s an extra twenty pounds of dead weight, but hey, who’s counting?
“That’s fuckin’ woeful,” the soldier admits with a snort, resuming his pace when the pilot begins to walk again, muttering to himself about what he should have done, as if the way things now stand isn’t a perfectly advantageous situation for him. “Should’a, could’a, would’a, flyboy,” he grunts. “Be real fuckin’ thankful it didn’t. If you weren’t shot outta the sky by a TIE fighter, you would’a been in a world of shit once you landed.”
They’re nearing the base now; even through the thick cover of trees and the din of nature, he can start to hear the steady hum of human activity. There’s a pause as he measures his words, heaving a pent-up sigh before calling out gruffly, “Hold up a fuckin’ minute.” He doesn’t release his hold on his blaster rifle until they’re once again next to one another, slipping an arm through the accompanying strap so that the weapon can hang disarmingly from his shoulder. “Don’t draw any unnecessary to yourself,” he advises. “People here see me bring you in at gunpoint an’ you’ll automatically be on several shit lists. Not everyone’s as nice as I am,” he deadpans, the joke as dry as a Jakku desert. “Y’look like a threat an’ you’ll be bendin’ ass over backwards for the rest of the war tryin’ to convince people you’re not.” At this point, Hoskuld’s convinced that this pilot is more of a threat to himself than he is to anyone else.
Falling asleep on autopilot. Un-fucking-real.
“An’ maybe leave out the whole naptime bit, when you’re talking to the officers in the Starfighter Corps.” It’s only when they’re near the cusp of the treeline with the base sprawled out before them that he gives the younger man another long, scrutinizing gaze. He reaches over without a word and, with a forceful tug, “straightens” the collar of the pilot’s shirt.
