Hey, the twins are still on their ship and OH MY CRAP WHAT JUST HAPPENED.
Claustrophobia, some violence and lots of yelling... but not about what you think.
Parts 1&2
Part 3
Troy worked until his eyes refused to stay open and he caught a sharp screw under the nail of his forefinger. He sat there, staring at the tiny wound until he felt his head tipping forward in another fit of his body trying to sleep.
He picked himself up, staggering on his bare feet and toeing his way to the bed. No need to hit the lighting controls. His sister had done that the last time she’d gotten up to piss. One of the Djira warbled at him. He stared at it an instant before pressing one knee to the mattress.
Tyreen growled. “Get back to work, asshole.”
“I-I can’t,” said Troy. “I’m too tired.”
“Why?”
“‘cause my back hurts and I’ve been up for… I forget.” The clock made no sense when he stared at it.
The straggle of that thought gave his sister time to act. She rolled over, definitely spreading herself over the bed.
Troy looked down. He saw himself curled up on the floor, like he had the last time he tried to sleep, anyway.
The floor wasn’t something he wanted. The bed looked so right. He could feel his bones resting there. But instead he knelt and he joined the image of himself. His skin prickled as he did.
He was off his feet. He was down. He could rest. He’d slept in less comfortable places. At least here there was nothing to eat him in the night.
Time passed. He was so close to resting.
On the bed, Tyreen snickered. “What, give up already? Aren’t you mad, Bro?”
“What’s the point of being angry with you after what you did?” Troy spat.
Then he waited in this weightless space between himself and sleep.
It wasn’t like he’d forgotten. Their last night on Nekrotafeyo simply hadn’t risen in him, hadn’t bitten since the first jump wet sideways. Yes, that was his fault.
But it was hers they were out here at all, hers he had a bruise on the tender part of his back, hers he wasn’t in his saggy old bed listening to the rain beat across the vault where he’d grown up.
His heart stung.
They were going to die out here.
And that would probably be her fault for making him leave all sudden-like and him with no choice, none at all. He could though… he could always wait for her to make sleep sounds. He could put the crystal cables around her neck or a hunting knife between her ribs. It would be so easy. She’d suffer less than he would, fading away without her.
Troy opened his eyes. He stared at the red spreading down his arm. Beneath it lay this gleam that ran deeper than his skin or even his sinew.
Tyreen’s marks went on for fathoms. They weren’t the same as his. And neither were her birth scars much like his at all.
The two sets still interlocked.
Troy hated himself for thinking of hurting her, but he hated having so little choice in so much that had happened to him in his short life.
He wondered, last of all before his heart shuddered and he slept, if his father had hated himself too, telling some stranger about wanting so badly to leave the place that had made him famous.
*
Tyreen screamed.
Troy smacked his knee on the side of the bed scrambling to his feet. He almost spun out onto the floor.
Her pupils were blown. She clawed at the wall at the foot of the bed. Didn’t seem to see him. Didn’t seem to know there was anybody there.
She kept saying his name though, now her words bled into focus.
“What!” He couldn’t hear anything over her. None of the emergency lights had tripped.
She stared at him. He felt it in his gut-- she couldn’t see him. Not in any reasonable way.
There was this weird rustling beep. He didn’t recognize it.
When Tyreen heard it, she clutched her ears and she screamed. So loud it made tension flare in his neck. It passed. She barely caught her breath and she tore at the wall, scrabbling across the seams, searching for something she could break. She snapped and tore and threw herself when that did nothing.
He was trying to talk, words slamming together. Calm down. Her name. Over and over until she finally blew past it, the thing that had set her off.
“Let me out! I can’t take it anymore!”
“Tyreen, stop!”
In a helpless surge of reflex, Troy grabbed her around the middle and tossed both of them over onto the bed. She fought with him, still shrieking. He got her fingers and her teeth in his face, her fist hard enough on his temple to draw out stars. When she tried to bring her knees up he smacked her down as hard as she could. She was still saying it the whole time: “Let me out! I want out! Stop it! Get off me!”
“No! Quit it!”
All at once she went still. She had him by the hair with one hand, the other drawn back for a blow, shuddering now that she’d stopped. The light came back in her eyes.
Troy blew in her face to try to get her to breathe.
She seethed and fell back, settling on what was for her a pretty half-assed slap.
On the console, the alarm sounded again.
Tyreen gasped. She covered her face with her palms and fought to squirm away.
Troy pulled away from her, little by little, trying not to startle or leave her much room to hurt herself. She got very still once she had no more of his weight on her waist and he chanced sliding the rest of the way, hoping he could make it to the console before the sound came again.
A single notice flicked on the screen.
He read it three times to make sure he knew what it said. Then he told her. “The cycler overcompensated for all of the toilet flushing. We’ve got a few too many pounds of air pressure in here. I just need to decompress a little.”
Tyreen looked at him, her face blank.
“It’ll take a few seconds, but it’s gonna make a hiss towards the bottom port side. OK?”
Rather than answer, Tyreen curled herself into a ball, covering her ears.
Troy could only count that as yes. The venting sound started as a scuffle and some of the animals perked awake. The hiss lasted perhaps five seconds and then the vent shut off automatically with a chime.
His sister sagged as if the muscle tone had drained out of her.
Troy walked back to the bed. “You’re really scared, huh?” he said.
Tyreen didn’t answer.
“You could have said something. I don’t…”
One more shiver passed over her, then she drooped to the side.
Troy, tired again after the adrenaline hit, went back to the floor.
*
She was in the water closet again when he woke up. Troy suspected she’d been there a while, still as everything felt around him, though that might have been the tightness rising in him.
He needed his sister to feed him. She wasn’t there. He waited and had some bread, trading one sensation to ease another.
Whatever they had to eat on Pandora, and Dad had made it pretty clear that was nothing ordinary people were supposed to enjoy, Troy wanted it. Even if it made him sick the first time. He did. Besides, he wasn’t ordinary, sitting there wondering if he could enjoy food after so long eating what he had rather than what he wanted.
He was wasting time to waste it. He washed off his face at the water cycler and watered the animals. A few of the hexlings were starting to droop. He might be able to tempt them with some of his bread if it came down to keeping them alive longer than Tyreen had anticipated.
It might not. He crawled back to the console and the up-ended jump drive. As tired as he’d let himself get last night, he was going to have to recheck his last hour of work. He just needed to remember what that had been. That or start over.
Fuck. He didn’t want to start over.
Besides, if that happened, then what if there was still just nothing besides a perfectly fine jump drive that didn’t work?
There’d be Tyreen.
He considered listening to the recording once more while she was occupied. Hearing Dad’s voice was at least familiar. Kind of. It was something he recognized in the quiet, fuming strangeness of the shuttle among the stars, though after last night…
There were ordinary things here too among the noises, including the clack of his screwdriver.
Troy stood. He moved to go to the water closet door, intending to knock.
Tyreen stamped out right before he did. She stared at the spread of equipment for a long while. Her marked hand twitched towards one of the spare electrical probes.
In the end, she placed herself in a corner and stared up at the ceiling since the lights were still on low where Troy had left them just in case anything too bright might bother her this morning.
Features the end of the mysterious recording previously featured, as well as more claustrophobia, and more Tyreen acting up.
He tried the jump to Pandora again. Tyreen snarled. Like she knew that he’d repeated himself long before the silent confirmation lit up the screen.
She said nothing and her silence came off in his veins. Troy could feel his whole body tetchy and waiting for her to slam in, fill his awareness. She didn’t though. She pushed off from the navigation console and she dived up to the ceiling, balancing along a seam on her fingertip. Her hair spread like crinoid tendrils as she bobbed back and forth and back and forth.
In a fit of movement, she’d turned herself over, hanging on another line.
Troy watched all of this in the console coating. He turned to tell her something. He didn’t exactly know what.
Tyreen lunged away. He heard her swear, but the sudden cycler sounds covered her words. She braced herself upside-down in the shadows of the cages
Again, he watched her through the coating.
Troy had never consciously realized how feral his sister behaved sometimes. It dawned on him now in a simple sort of way.
She had always been-- his sister. His playmate. That voice up ahead of him on the trail. The qualities of her company hadn’t mattered.
But soon, other people would know her. Would they realize? Would the truth come to them that much sooner than it had to him where sometimes when he slept he swore he could still feel her sharing their blood at his side?
Troy shook his head.
“What?” demanded Tyreen.
So she was watching him back.
“Figuring,” he said.
He’d been trying so hard to think of something other than where they’d found themselves. He’d tried until it hurt and now his thoughts were those of a tired boy, not, well, whatever he was.
His attention moved over the virgule on his wrist. He placed his hand on the side of the console, stranding fingerprints behind. Then he slid himself underneath.
One thing at a time. He’d check the control wires. Her eyes would skim the back of his neck.
He’d think about circuits and pretend.
It was one thing to walk in the footsteps of a toothy, little hunter like his sister.
Then it was another to be alone on a shuttle retrofitted with a subspace jump drive meant for products from another company. With someone who saw with phantom teeth.
*
The console wiring checked out. Troy pried up the floor panel and inspected the crystalline fibers connecting to the internal parts of the jump drive. Sometimes the things shattered. He’d brought some refurbished lines in case that happened, using the newest ones for their first attempts. The data flow checked out as normal from both the mini interface on the jump drive and all three ports he tried on the console. He could start most of the diagnostics on the drive from the shuttle controls he found. Some of the more granular checks would only start locally. “Gravitational field detected. Failsafe test in five… four…” and then a shuddering click at zero that gave him a pleased emoji.
The internal parts of the drive further reported no issues with the external portion.
Troy sighed. He pulled his legs out of the equipment well. His left hip popped. A dull burn started in his thigh muscles. He’d been sitting for too long with the gravity on. And now that the adrenaline was fading out, he was left with plain stress substances that were going to swell into more pain. Plus, he really wanted to wash his face.
But Tyreen sat with her back to the water closet door. Soon, she’d head in. She’d been moving in a circuit through the cabin: water cycler, grinding to herself, water closet, dozing, back to the cycler until she was dribbling down the front of her shirt.
“So hey,” Troy said.
She narrowed her eyes at him.
“I need your Coeus. It’s got the manual for the jump drive.”
“What good’s the manual gonna do!” Tyreen snapped. “It says ‘unknown error’. There’s no ‘unknown error’ in the index. What the hell sense would that make anyway?”
“You looked?”
Tyreen lunged. She yanked the Coeus out of its cradle and flung it at him.
Troy scrambled to catch it, landing facedown on the dirty floor.
Snickers flowed from her and the suppers she’d disturbed with all the sudden movements.
His elbow ached too. Troy laid the Coeus down in front of him and tried to straighten out his back. He drummed his fingers until the twinges had died down. “I know that’s all you’ve got to do.” He did his best to lead her to maybe lending him a hand. This was kind of a one-person job, but it might keep her mind occupied to hand him tools and read him pages. She read pretty good. He almost hoped.
Instead, Tyreen went to the cages. She grabbed a hexling by the neck, spilling sand on its cage mates and then grabbing the vacuum, which got everything screaming.
Some of those were maybe his food too. Well, after he tried at least a few more things.
Like slapping the Coeus on his knee until the screen worked again.
*
The way he saw it, Troy had possible problems.
He’d botched the internal installation. The jump drive wasn’t like any of the surviving equipment from Dad’s ship proper. Sod’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. He was a pretty big whatever.
They’d botched the external installation somehow. It was supposed to be simple: affix a box someplace that no other equipment would interfere. They’d placed that box half a foot beneath the viewscreen camera. The two might have started chattering to one another. In that case, they had no equipment to spacewalk; no way to move the two apart.
The external portion had broken during the jump. That was appreciably the worst case. They had a chance of reaching somewhere with a misplaced external unit. A broken one and this, the shuttle, was everything they had left; that and the great unknown of problems he could not predict, swells of existences no one had ever pulled out of the emptiness, breakages he could not see, somethings behind his perception which that, that he wished he hadn’t thought of with the animals acting up given Tyreen stirring restless on the bed again.
He decided it was an installation issue. He could fix that. Even if he had to take the whole jump drive out and put it back in.
That ran the risk of damage. But they might already be drowning in damage.
Might be. Could be. Sworn to things he couldn’t see.
The only thing driving him crazier seemed to sneer at him from the shuttle’s directories.
Once again, Troy took the headphones out. He pretended this time that he jacked them into the Coeus, even though the Coeus had no sound output.
He took a deep breath and he listened.
“Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when you act all shy.”
Troy closed his hand on his knee and pressed his hand down as hard as he could.
He went headfirst into the kiss, knowing it was there this time. He hadn’t even heard the whole thing the first time. His face got so hot.
“You know what else is different, Doll? You. Yeah, they don’t have girls like you on Pandora. It’s kinda, what’s the word, rustic out there at the edge of everything that is and, you know.”
“I know I spent the whole party looking for you and now here I am, telling you the truth. It’s so crazy.”
“Truth’s always crazy. Didn’t you know? But so what about that. We’re both gonna get something we want. I’m never going back to Pandora, mmm,” Dad smacked his lips in that thinking way he did sometimes. He did so in spite of his company. “Shot my way out of this monster’s asshole once. Did I tell you that one already?”
“You can tell me again.”
“And again. But no. Nevvver going back to Pandora. And you want, hmm, I think I know what you want.”
“I want to see the stars.”
There was static. Rustling clothes. A transmission beep. And then nothing. The recording ended.
Troy watched a handful of other bright spots topple off of the side of the viewscreen. He wondered if this, however this ended, meant he’d had his fill of stars.
Reposting 1 since I changed the one line that gets repeated. Ooof. This thing might be quite a few parts! Not complaining. Def. expect a spit-polished version on Ao3 eventually.
Anyway, last verse same as the first: Twins on the ship, something fishy is going on, Tyreen’s being Tyreen. Hecking claustrophobia.
The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black. No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant. Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.
Tyreen drifted at his shoulder. He could feel her fuming.
Neither of them had said anything sound since they’d stopped. The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed. A word from either of them would disturb this.
Besides, this wasn’t Pandora. This wasn’t even the Pandoran system. Or any system. This was nothing.
“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.
“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen. “They can’t move that fast. We should at least be able to see it!”
He gestured a spiral with his hand. Did she care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system? He decided to summarize. “I think the computer’s a little off and umm…”
“Umm what?”
“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”
“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something. He half-expected a slap.
“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.
She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.
“We can’t run out of power. We jumped fine. We have water. We have food. We have a working toilet.”
“And where are we!”
“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”
“Can’t you math it in your head?”
“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars. The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only stars thick enough to make mist out of each other. “I don’t think so.”
Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.
*
Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did. Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder. Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on. There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her. She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.
Her Coeus reader was flickering lately. She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.
She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on. I gotta piss.”
“Alright. On three. Three.” Troy threw the switch. His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console. His sister landed with a thump. Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor. Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door. One of them shrieked after her. Troy shushed it and went back to the console.
The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body. He pulled up the extrapolation program. Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away. The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell. Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational. Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.
Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try. She was the Siren. She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.
She was still in the water closet.
Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive. It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly-style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed. He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.
Every system responded in good order. He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump. The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his very existence for a heartbeat.
He even dug into the audio system. If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.
A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder. Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement somehow proper and complained when he tried.
Tempted again, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.
He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file. Since that was probably it.
Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here.. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when you…”
He slammed stop.
There was somebody else on the file too. They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.
Troy stared at the file.
A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist. “What the hell was that?”
“Ah, system check. Since we’re here, you know.”
She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants. “Warn me next time.”
“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”
Those words didn’t even merit an answer. She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.
The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her. She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing Siren anytime before they made planetfall.
And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?
*
Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach. Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen. The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.
Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.
It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent. Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.
He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.
The jump drive reported usable quiescence. Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed. Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.
It had only been two days. He thought. The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading. Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.
What Tyreen said they were doing.
Like, she just… dragged him. Now?
Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.
“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.
“Mm. Nothing,” Troy murmured. “I was thinking about when we were kids. That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one.” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.
Tyreen sat up, still hunched over. Her Coeus rattled in her grasp. Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots. “I’m eating now. You want in?”
“Sure.”
Food was something to do anyway. Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead. He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.
Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs. Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?
She took two eggs.
The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae. Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him. As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him. “Open it for me.”
Troy sighed. Speaking of games from when they were children, Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand. He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the instruments.
The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside. It turned to dust and glass. “Hmm. That was fresher than I thought.”
“Good. Want me to do the other one too?”
“Sure.”
So, he sliced again. He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super.
This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees. “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”
“If I did,” Troy said softly, “then we’ll deal wi-…”
Tyreen leeched the other egg, sloppily this time, sand leaking between her toes. She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.
Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up. The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen. Well, it was that time by the engine clock.
*
Tyreen sat in the bed. She left her Coeus in the charging station and kept scratching her ankles. Suddenly, she tugged her socks off, tossed them aside and toppled over and over the blanket until she ended up beneath it. She turned the lights down and resumed watching the space above her.
“Hey, Troy?” she said.
“Hey yeah,” he answered, turning in the seat for the navigation console. The old bearings hissed.
“Who decided which way the ceiling goes in these things?”
That didn’t sound like a her question. It held too much potential to wander. It also did, echoing in him as he considered if she wanted an answer or not. In a way too, it made sense. Space brought no horizon for her to navigate, no right side of a Marrow Bone to climb. “Well, that’s the same place the ceiling went wherever it was built. There’s no up out here.”
“Right, right.”
“No North either.”
“So we can’t get to Pandora upside down?” she asked that last part in a slow, measured voice.
“We actually cannot do that. But we are…” Troy pointed towards the viewscreen. “…somersaulting real slow that way if you see the stars changing at the edges of the viewscreen. It’s just with the gravity on we…”
“OK, OK. I get it. I’m going to sleep now.” She turned over, back to him, clenching the covers. “Saving my excitement for later or whatever.”
He could tell she was still hungry, the way she bundled up. Troy didn’t mention it though. Instead, he said, “Excitement shouldn’t be much longer.”
There was no answer.
*
Troy listened for his sister’s breathing to even out and to the abandoned place kind of quiet in the shuttle. The water and oxygen cycler ran every fifteen minutes, bubbling at the end. The fans for the computer equipment hummed in a way that reminded him of the ruins back on Nekrotafeyo. Their Djira murmured at one another through the dried scrub that made up their cages and the faint chemical reek of their drained acid.
And the sounds of her sleeping. That too.
Little by little, he swung towards his pack, slipping his fingers inside and feeling around until his touch glanced a familiar cord.
The headphones were older than him, their audio tinny and erratic given the air algae patches on the wires.
Troy held one pad to his ear. The jack filled with static as he tabbed back to the errant audio file. He set the volume down low and pressed play.
The speaker rang to life. There was music— synth and beats and wind instruments. Some other sound too, water or distant conversation.
Then, Dad’s voice. “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when you act all shy. No, wait, wait, wait…” a swish of movement followed, besides the strains of laughter. Typhon. And a woman. “…there’s some fancy word for that.”
“Coy? Coquettish?” Fuck, her voice was light as sunshine, ephemeral and gone someplace in the worn-out headphones. “Well, Mr. DeLeon, what’s the big idea? I followed you back to your little ship.”
“No, no. It’s a boat. Ships are big. Got names.”
“So I must be anything but shy. Riiight?”
“You know I put the recorder on.”
“Oooh. That’s different.”
There was a kiss.
Troy swallowed. He shut the playback off and pulled the headphones out of the jack.
He breathed like he’d been down to the bottom of a crater lake long enough to make his ears throb.
He breathed and breathed until the cycler ran and Tyreen snuffled in her sleep.
The location program still hadn’t produced a result. It seemed to be running slower again. Feeling over the housing for the processor, he didn’t think it felt any warmer than the rest of the shuttle, so it wouldn’t be a mechanical issue. Hopefully.
Troy stood and stretched. He tried to wash his face in the water closet, but that got him cold. In the end, he went over to the bed, still damp, and he pressed himself into the smallest place beside his sister that he could manage.
The thing was damned uncomfortable, lumpy and musty and too short for him. Besides, he had no way to match the fold of his knees to Tyreen’s. What little space he did find wasn’t a comfortable one.
He rubbed at his eyes one more time, tracking water off from his lashes. In the brief moment before his eyes focused he saw his father, a shadow of a woman draped elegantly beside him as they each breathed wine on the microphone.
He also saw himself, curled up below the bed, arm wrapped protectively around his head.
That looked even less comfortable than he felt.
Besides, he was too tired to move.
*
Tyreen chased him out of the way so she could head to the water closet. One of the hexlings chittered at her as she passed and she flipped it off. She stayed in, swearing for awhile, as Troy pressed himself to the wall side. He left her the blanket and squeezed his toes between the mattress and the wall.
He almost slept again before the toilet flushed and she returned. She ground herself to his back, so close he could taste her breath when she sleep-sighed. Well, he got some blanket too this way.
Troy thought he heard her scuffling off of the bed right before he drifted off again, but it must have been the shuttle itself again since his last awareness was of her nearness making his back twinge.
They got up together what would have been shortly before dawn by their clock. Troy ate a slice of bread and Tyreen the leaking Djira. She swung around to the consoles with one of its clipped claws dangling between her fingers. “Yeah, that one was no good for you. This didn’t poof. Musta been dead.”
“Sure didn’t,” said Troy. “Look what I’ve got.”
Tyreen looked from a space bent over his lap. A pleased snicker flowed from her. She pointed to a globule of brightness wedged in the very corner of the viewscreen. “Pandora’s that way! Yes!”
Recalling what his fancy from earlier, that maybe she could spy their destination between all of the emptiness, Troy laughed too. There were other stars in the way and lagging behind, but she looked pretty much right to him based on the jump display. “Pandora’s where we’ll be in like ten minutes. Just gotta get us cued up.” He made a show of gliding his hand up the charge slider for the jump drive console. “Well, and then a day or two while we pull into the system and land. I’m not gonna take us in super close because of…”
“Yeah, yeah. We’re almost there!”
“We’re almost there!”
The parameters for landing the jump hadn’t saved. He muttered to himself as he slid them back in. He wanted the shuttle to appear this many AUs from the planet, LaGrange points to be avoided in case of debris or sudden space stations. Time was as soon as possible. Gravity…
As Tyreen fiddled with her Coeus, he announced, “Heavy off on three. Three!”
And his sister, reader in hand, pushed up on her toes, floating towards the ceiling as her supper squealed and the fan in the water closet took up some stray water droplets.
This was a much smaller jump than the last one. It took, well, closer to twenty minutes for the system to finish processing exactly how to suck them through spacetime.
The chime sounded. Troy hovered his hand over the execute button, wiggling an eyebrow at his sister and daring her to push it first. She lunged. He slammed his fist down. She pulled his hair as he laughed again.
And then nothing.
Unknown Error said the jump drive console. Nothing else changed. There wasn’t even a chime from the audio system.
HEY KIDS WHO WANTS TO SEE THE TWINS ON THEIR SHIP HEADED TO PANDORA.
IT’S REALLY TINY.
AND THEY’RE HAVING ENGINE TROUBLE.
...or are they?
Lots of Tyreen eating and some other general nastiness from her. Appreciably Claustrophobic.
The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black. No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant. Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.
Tyreen drifted at his shoulder. He could feel her fuming.
Neither of them had made much sound since they’d stopped. The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed. A word from either of them would disturb this.
Besides, this wasn’t Pandora. This wasn’t even the Pandoran system. Or any system. This was nothing.
“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.
“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen. “They can’t move that fast. We should at least be able to see it!”
He gestured a spiral with his hand. Did she even care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system? He decided to summarize. “I think the computer’s a little off and umm...”
“Umm what?”
“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”
“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something. He half-expected a slap.
“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.
She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.
“We can’t run out of power. We jumped just fine. We have water. We have food. We have a working toilet.”
“And where are we!”
“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”
“Can’t you math it in your head?”
“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars. The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only points of light thick enough to make mist out of each other. “I kinda don’t think so.”
Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.
*
Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did. Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder. Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on. There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her. She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.
Her Coeus reader was flickering lately. She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.
She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on. I gotta piss.”
“Alright. On three. Three.” Troy threw the switch. His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console. His sister landed with a thump. Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor. Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door. One of them shrieked after her. Troy shushed it and went back to the console.
The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body. He pulled up the extrapolation program. Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away. The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell. Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational. Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.
Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try. She was the siren. She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.
She was still in the water closet.
Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive. It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed. He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.
Every system responded in good order. He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump. The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his stomach halfway there, not more than a heartbeat.
He even dug into the audio system. If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.
A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder. Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement de rigeur and complained when he tried.
Tempted to try, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.
He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file. Since that was probably it.
Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite little minx. Yeah, that’s a good girl. Let me see those eyes shine. I love it when you...”
He slammed stop.
There was somebody else on the file too. They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.
Troy stared at the file. He breathed again.
A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist. “What the hell was that?”
“Ah, system check. Since we’re here, you know.”
She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants. “Warn me next time.”
“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”
Those words didn’t even merit an answer. She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.
The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her. She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing siren anytime before they made planetfall.
And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?
*
Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach. Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen. The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.
Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.
It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent. Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.
He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.
The jump drive ticked down to usable quiescence. Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed. Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.
It had only been two days. He thought. The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading. Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.
What Tyreen said they were doing.
Like, she just… dragged him. Now?
Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.
“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.
“Mm. Nothing,” Troy murmured. “I was thinking about when we were kids. That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one and...” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.
Tyreen sat up, still hunched over. Her Coeus rattled in her grasp. Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots. “I’m eating now. You want in?”
“Sure.”
Food was something to do anyway. Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead. He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.
Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs. Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?
She took two eggs.
The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae. Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him. As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him. “Open it for me.”
Troy sighed. Speaking of games from when they were children— Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand. He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the Instruments.
The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside. It turned to dust and glass. “Hmm. That was fresher than I thought.”
“Good. Want me to do the other one too?”
“Sure.”
So, he sliced again. He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super as much as the second egg leaked.
This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees. “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”
“If I did,” Troy said softly. “Then we’ll deal wi-...”
Tyreen sucked the other egg down, sloppy now, sand leaking between her toes. She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.
Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up. The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen. Well, it was that time by the engine clock.
Rough Excerpt of Sampaguita, Chapter 3 - Bordertober
I had someone who clearly needed a full, tagged scene with OC Catter, so here you be!
Here is the story so far. LSS: Tyreen and Troy have a brief stint as mercs not that long after arriving on Pandora. NOTE THE TAGS. Black comedy. On slow mode for Reasons. Tyreen PoV.
This excerpt contains Tyreen being gross, a lot of food, drinking, snot, Troy torment and, a really crass joke about the Troyreen in this ‘verse.
Also Catter. I stinking love Catter.
...I’m not sorry.
Troy sat under a smokey overhang by the kitchen trailer. Three other people had planted their asses there first, all bumming cigarettes off of each other and sneezing a lot— Biscuits (his biscuitiness accented by lop-mouthed smoking stance), Vincent (tall, dark, handsome and gesturing ashes all over with his silver cigarette holder) and somebody who went by Lotty (more of a human pony bead and spray tan accident).
There was beef jerky. Sort of. Not enough of it to justify more than a page of the Exceptional Exotics’ employment contracts.
Lotty was saying, holding a tin stickered with a happy cowboy up to Troy, “Now, the correct way to eat beef snuff…”
“Also known as machaca, if you’re feeling fancy,” Vincent interrupted.
And Troy nodded.
This pattern repeated: “Is to, well, snuff it. You put a little on your finger.”
“The middle, if you’re feeling fancy.”
Though Troy’s nod came on the tentative side that time. Wrinkles showed in the corners of his eyes as he pondered whether he was fancy or not.
Biscuits leaned in, pressing an encouraging hand to Troy’s back, Troy being too lost in thought to protest more than leaning maybe an inch to the side. “It’s not like doing cocaine at all. And you really have to really suck it in…” A wet snort accompanied this assertion. “… from deeeeep in your chest.”
“The trick’s in where you put the back of your tongue.” Lotty said, their voice tilting towards some sort of conclusion.
This being stolen from them by Vincent, “But oh, the joy of meat sinuses.”
“You would say that.”
“You know you love me.”
“I love you like the parched earth loves spilled beer.”
“So, not at all today. Boo.”
It was at this point Tyreen tossed up the hood of her jacket and stamped across the puddles pissing down through the leaky rain shield. “Troy!”
Troy having meanwhile swept his middle finger through the shredded jerky and right up to his nostrils. Deftly, he pressed his thumb to the left side. The shredded meat disappeared.
Tyreen was too late. Troy doubled over, sneeze-coughing goopy, brown snot. “I can taste that in my ears,” he wheezed.
“Really?” remarked Lotty. “That’s a new one. Are you sure, ‘cause I mean, if you really wanna taste with your ears…” This sentiment unfinished, they lifted both of their hands, beckoning to Vincent and Biscuits. The two men had already grumblingly taken out actual paper cash, what with the ECHONet still being toast.
And Troy, still hacking.
Tyreen shooed off Biscuits and beat Troy about the back until he showed some semblance of sense— namely, horking with purpose until he was king of breathing again.
“If you’re going to squeal to the boss,” Vincent said, sucking on his cigarette, “Get us some more jerky while you’re in there? I don’t want what he sneezed on.”
“On no planet was that a sneeze. You don’t get it, man!” Troy protested.
“That’s a lie. Lotty got him twice,” said Biscuits.
Well, that had to be embarrassing for somebody.
Unlike her brother, Tyreen did not stop to ponder and definitely not anything about snorting beef jerky. “He brought this on himself. That’s plenty for me. C’mon. They opened the beer taps.” One more thwack and she turned her hand around, grabbing Troy by the back of his jacket and hauling.
He pinwheeled half a step in front of her. “I don’t even like beer and neither do you,” he muttered, then discharged more snot into his hand.
Besides, there was a line for said beer. Someone had written on the tarp overhanging the taps: Welcome! No names though, just like nobody announced that food was served in some way that didn’t involve anybody’s noses. At a certain point, Colonel Admusik stepped out of her trailer and made her way to a ktichen trailer window where a plate of something greasy, steaming and flickering oversized bones appeared. She took her pick of seats at one of the rickety picnic tables, tucked a cloth napkin into her collar and sat down. Two of the face-tattooed howitzer operators dived to offer her their beers before fighting their way back into line.
Tyreen wouldn’t have said she’d wanted announced, but the company seemed like a place that announced people. Besides, an excuse to shoot something else would have wrung more laughter out of this crowd, maybe gotten her offered a beer. Not that she could have drunk said beer. Anyway, she got the angle now. There were two ranks here: the colonel and all the other mercs.
So, apparently she and Troy were other mercs now. Tyreen had not been aware that mercs served short ribs for food. She was also unclear on exactly what a ‘short rib’ might entail. Which ribs counted as short? Why not eat the long ribs first since they must contain more delicious meat? Was it absolutely necessary to stop an entire company of mercs in the middle of a downpour to set up a kitchen trailer and make a welcome dinner which was now doomed to get damp while the people who ate it veered into a risk of missing… something. Whatever the hell job this “gentleperson’s operation” was on or headed for or somewhat towards.
Tyreen didn’t know about that either. She also hadn’t bothered to ask. Closer to the urge worked for her. She swung up to the window ahead of Troy. “I heard something about rum rations.”
“Rum and short ribs?” The cookie gave her a squint, but shrugged and ponied up a quarter split with an orange slice and some soda machine ice. “How many?”
“Ah, yeah, pass on that. I don’t do bones.” Casting her hand up briefly, she removed herself from the window before facing anymore of an argument. This dinner was going to suck hard enough without a plate of dead thing under her nose, teasing her with it’s infernal pre-deadedness. Tyreen’s belly had already started to do the gurgling, twisty thing where the part of her that ate gathered there and tried to peek out of her navel. At least she had rum and the urge to distract her until nightfall and the Skågåsbord that would bring. They were still out there. She could sense them flickering about the hills.
Then of course her brother had to go and acquire an overflowing plate of bones, his mashed potatoes relegated to a mug which he carried balanced on his elbow. Tyreen got to the table first, cracking open her rum and slugging it right out of the bottle. Sweet stuff, super dark. Probably wouldn’t make her retch. Her orange slice went on her brother’s potatoes once he’d gotten everything onto the table without incident. He shrugged and ate it anyway, greasy garlic butter and skin and all, smiling at her with the rind pressed over his teeth.
Tyreen glowered at him. She then flicked his nose and slid back to her drink, twisting it over and over as he chewed and more people got food and the shields leaked and the beer line got loud.
Idly, she wondered what anybody would do if she gnawed on a bone. Not that she was going to. Bones made a fine justification for not eating this thing or that other thing, so no way she would. She had that urge of her own though, sometimes after sunset and skimming on her tongue.
And Colonel Admusik only carried picnic tables that seated three to a side. The far one of their table? Still empty when Hypothetical Third Person planted her ass beside Troy. She made a chirp when she did, as though she had a squeaker in her ass.
Tyreen peered around Troy.
And the person waved, fork on her lips. She was smallish, fairish, made-up-ish, wearing a Dahl army coat three sizes too big for her. Peroxide blond hair dragged in her eyes, themselves the color of moss. The Terran kind that never accidentally made teeth like the stuff on Nekrotafeyo.
Troy managed to pull himself away from his plate long enough to tilt his head her way and jostle his occupied shoulder at her. Like— hello, I am eating, other person who had at least ten other places to sit.
This one craned over her own plate and she stared out at him through his magazine cover kind of smile. Finally, she gestured with one gloved hand, flicking her finger close enough to Troy’s left eye that she got a jolt out of him. “So, who does your work?” she asked, words somersaulting over each other.
Troy’s fork froze in mid-air. “This? Oh, uum a few people.” Rather than look her quite in the face, or stop eating, he wiggled his hand and dripped gravy. “They didn’t come out so great the first time.”
“It wasn’t Miss Moju on Rigil 7, was it? ‘cause she’s getting hella sued and if you want in on that, I got the contact stuff for the lawyer on my ECHO.”
“Oh. No, not her. I didn’t even think about her.” Troy ended that on half a snort.
One Tyreen could have joined him for.
Except this person acted like she thought he’d laughed. She tittered back.
And she totally cut Tyreen off, but that was another story. With titters.
“Really? You must be pretty hardcore.” She held her hand out, slower than she’d talked, her hips wiggling in her seat. Tyreen could hear her boots swishing under the table besides. “I didn’t think about her either. I’m Catter. Colonel said you were Troy?”
Troy nodded. He dipped his fork into his potatoes, leaving it there. He had to twist his whole self sideways to offer her his wrong hand, but his joints were hyperflexible garbage and he only had the one hand to offer anybody, so he managed OK, tilted his head up too, not that he exactly made eye-contact. “Yes. It’s nice to meet you. This is…”
Catter’s head, then her shoulders, tipped to the side. She looked like she was trying to shed some part of herself, and in fact she kind of did. The sleeve of her too-big coat nonetheless rode up about an inch on her left wrist.
Glinting geometric swirls poked out.
”Oopsie,” she said, holding her other hand almost to her mouth.
Tyreen made a face. To cover that, she also stuck her rum in said face. Smacking off of her bottle, she added, “You did that on purpose. Just say you’re a fangirl next time, shit. You think we care?” Anyway, she’d heard whispers in the alleys of the ECHONet, about how “pirate AU fanfiction isn’t valid, you weirdos” and also “my sister’s Siren fangirl for cosplays and it’s kind of fucked up”.
Well, Tyreen knew what fangirl and cosplay (an associated term) meant in the same way she knew what short ribs meant. The terms raised more questions than answers. But there was Catter. Quod erat demonstrandum. Also, no way this person was a Siren. She smelled like some kind of plant and not a primeval space magic at all.
“I thought we were having fun,” said Catter, finally breaking the shake with Troy and pressing a finger to her infernally perfect dimple. “Is she always so grumpy?”
Troy’s back tensed as he answered, despite the evenness of his tone. “Are you always so effervescent?”
One of those words earned him a confused blink, and another titter. “ I… What? Hee! I should have known you were different. A guy with Siren ink. That’s just so… I’m sorry. I’ve never actually seen one! Or a Siren. But I’m gonna fix that.” Catter turned a look of determination, first to the sky, and then to Troy.
“Ah, me neither. And now you have.”
“So! So! I drew mine myself and I got a whole set, see?” Her coat went onto the table. Two other mercs steered away, off to less occupied shores. Underneath, she wore a sleeveless collar top and no bra. Tyreen wasn’t wearing a bra either, so whatever on that, but the loopy tattoo business liberally slathered onto Catter’s person proved to be the single most gruesome shade of magenta that Tyreen had ever seen. Like exploded printer magenta.
“And I see you like pink,” Troy offered, congenially.
Catter wiggled and drew closer once more. She still did not touch, but her eyes traced over Troy’s own markings with a precision. “Did you draw yours too? I know some places that’s a thing, but some other places you let your artist do…”
“I drew them,” said Tyreen.
A sound of distress followed. “You didn’t give him a whole set?”
“Like you said. He’s a guy. Maybe he doesn’t get a whole set. Maybe he has to earn them.”
“Wow, you two have like LORE worked out? Are you on SirenSona.net?”
“We like to keep it to ourselves. It’s, umm our stuff,” Troy said, attempting to turn away, hand in his hair this time.
“Oh, am I intruding? I’m sorry it’s just I love your eye mark and she…” Catter’s hand once more intruded, but this time she at least had the sense to apply to to her fork after she thought better. It was with her off-hand that she gestured between her table mates. “Actually, what are you two?”
Tyreen snorted.
And Troy said: “Oh, we’re cousins.” His grin flashed even in the corner of his silhouette. He tried just that hard.
So no wonder Tyreen had to fish him the rest of the way out of the proverbial ditch. “And we’re married.”
“What?” Catter’s eyes were now the size of SAT-V hubcaps. “Really? That’s wild.”
“Cousins are made for cousins, that’s what they said back at the old commune,” Troy laughed. Wow, he almost sounded convincing.
To Catter, anyway. “So you like grew up together?”
“Yeah.”
“And now you do it?”
“Yes, Catter,” snergled Tyreen. “That’s part of being married. Do you wanna come mop up our bed tonight when we get done doing it?” She layered on the sincerity, as if plying for her personal dinner. This had gotten old about five absurdities ago.
“Nooo.” As for how much no, Catter pressed one (still-gloved) finger to her lips. “But anytime you wanna fanperson, we can do that. Like you’re part of the team now and I want you to feel welcome and I’ve got that limited edition gravure with the Lilith buttshot. The one where. You know. You can see.”
Tyreen and her brother both nodded, though Tyreen could only imagine what was on display. If she’d had a human appetite, this might have been detrimental to it.
[Catter actually exists as an explanation for why the twins were managed to run around without covering their markings for APPARENT YEARS. She is not a criticism of any Siren OC. I love and feed Siren OCs ficlets.]
Tyreen’s view of waking up at Dr. Black’s. Contains medical/injury material, Tyreen being gross and some vaguely hinted at Troyreen. Note that Part 2 is shaping up to be more obvious about this. Probably nothing graphic, since I’m planning to recut all of the Dr. Black shorts into a single story. Oh, and I put her H/C post at the bottom.
Waking up at Dr. Black’s had been embarrassing more than anything else. She’d had no idea where she was the first few times she came around. There were now two holes in her torso and two in her right arms. She couldn’t do anything for herself. Ugh-- that part was the worst. Troy gave her a bath with fucking people wipes. She got sacks full of doped up skag pups and chickens for food. She did not get to toilet herself. Nope, stuck in bed except for leg stretches twice a day, no complaints, ring the bell if you need anything.
And then that woman, leaning over her, poking her with clamps and sounds because she couldn’t use her hands. Well, it took the fever rolling off of her for Tyreen to take notice of it, but Dr. Black seems to keep all of her dexterity in those fingers of hers. The rest of her had some mild form of dyskinesia, probably an old injury pretty far down her spine. It happened to make her look like easy prey, but Tyreen figurds not devouring the person who procured her pain meds might work out better in the long run.
Meds meaning she slept a lot. Actually, Tyreen wasn’t sure that she’d ever slept so much in her whole life. She spent most of the days under for a few restless hours at dawn or dusk spent ticking over a third-hand ECHO and feeling her guts lurch at random as the moon smirked down the operating theater skylight. She made it to the bottom of a music swapping forum she’d been eyeing and listened to old school synth jazz while reading Vonnegut or something called “Pirate AU Fanfiction” which she didn’t realize was derivative until she found the one starring Arthur Gordon Pym of all characters.
So it wasn’t like she was bored. Hell, the weird thrum of her body knitting back together could have kept her occupied.
The stillness in her bones though ached worse than her bullet wound.
Tyreen sighed. She ran her hand down her torso to the sore, bruised place trailing off from her entry wound. She pressed ever so lightly until her belly twinged and her toes curled.
This didn’t so much remind her of the fact she was going to be wearing a lovely S&S Munitions bullet for the rest of her life. It reminded her of that other itch she couldn’t scratch, the one that was going to take talking instead of prowling to fix.
~*~
Dr. Black at least took hints. Tyreen bitched at her about being woken up closer to noon than not exactly once. Next time? Dawn hadn’t even cracked
She got her vitals taken and her bandages changed. The IV came out and that was the only blood that leaked out of her that day. Her wrappings still got all sticky and rheumy, but they weren’t brown anymore in that way that kind of made her want to suck on them.
So, a lot of next times later, it finally happened: “Well, you’re healing up nicely if I do say so myself. What do you want to do first?”
Weird. Tyreen never asked Troy what he wanted to do when he started improving after a spell or a fall. She squinted at Dr. Black. “Is that a trick question?”
“Well, I don’t recommend BASE jumping for obvious reasons, but no?” Not that Dr. Black sounded sure of this.
“I need my hair washed. That dry shampoo made it all sandy and shit. Then I wanna go outside and, you know.”
“I’m out of chickens, sorry.”
Tyreen rolled her eyes. She’d actually meant piss on a fence post and scope out the best vantages for ambushes, but she was getting hungry too, so of course the woman had to mention. “Whatever. Hair first.”
“Well, your brother and me already figured out how to do that since you’re still not cleared to shower because germ transfer. Get ready.”
The two of them maneuvered her onto one of the rolling stools and pushed her into the kitchen rather than any of the bathrooms-- for a woman living alone, Dr. Black had at least three according to her hallway.
Tyreen’s impression of the kitchen was what it smelled of some unfamiliar grassy-brown spice and eggs. Most food didn’t tempt her anymore, but there was something about the whiff of a runny yolk that got her tongue to stir. Anyway, the stainless steel sink had been scrubbed out and Tyreen knew where this was going. She groaned.
She’d been all of four the last time anybody washed her hair for her, let alone in a sink. Sink salons were for babies.
Troy’s hand rested on her shoulder. “It’s just for a couple of times. What else have I been doing for you? And did the world end, Ty?”
“Fine. I want two washes and extra gooey stuff.” She meant conditioner, but she flicked her tongue over her lips pronouncing it gooey stuff like a drunk her.
Troy blinked way too hard, but he nodded and finished wheeling her over.
So much for innuendo getting her anyplace today. He was probably stuck in his own head for a change. Contemplating caring for her. Like it was… like it was that big of a deal after all the trash that had happened.
Just like when they worked on her, Dr. Black handed over the equipment and he used it, though this time, easy on the instructions.
Troy bundled her up in a towel, wet her and worked the first round of shampoo in slow, scratching over the residue on her scalp and using the dish sprayer to double rinse. The whole time he leaned over her, face tight with concentration. He wouldn’t look her in the eyes and Tyreen couldn’t say she wanted him too, not even when he went for the wet/dry trimmer and neatened up her unintentional undercut.
“You want anymore off?” he asked the window and not her.
“Just get the really messed up part in the back.”
“OK, turn.”
The hum of the trimmer felt kind of nice on her damp skin; that and the way he combed his fingers over her fuzz after, even though the next spritz got her free of snibbles, would have without his intervention.
For the conditioner, he let that set and combed her out, streaking the remains of her bangs down her forehead, then rubbing them away from her eyebrows when they got too close.
Tyreen sighed up at him.
Since she caught his eyes, he did manage something resembling a smile and his fingers dragged against her for the last round of rinsing.
With him and her both patted dry, she finally got hoisted back to a sitting position, her hair dropping once more down her cheeks before she reached up, scruffing it out and sneezing by some coincidence.
Dr. Black stifled a laugh.
Dr. Black
Dr. Black was a small, fat woman with a crooked jaw and a crooked smile and a penchant for wearing hoop skirts with no panties underneath.
-Says her full name is Calvin Decker Black
-Has at least one ex-husband and is possibly using his name???
-Probably not a doctor, but close enough
-Good at working with what she has; absolute kludge queen
--Has an affection for out-of-date equipment, but can run almost any test off of her ECHO. Somehow. Don’t ask.
---Speaking of which, carries the Twin’s genomes around on hers and has heavily notated them. Heaven forbid that got into the wrong hands.
---Recognizable ECHO device with a formal Delft print
--Sometimes uses medical equipment for secondary purposes, i.e. pointing with a sound, employing that nice steel vomit tray as a casserole
-Cheerful, enthusiastic, curious, bit of a spazz, insensible to gore.
--It’s possible to get her and Mouthpiece going at the same time. Mind your eardrums.
-Loves food. Pretty good cook. Rather more fond of food other people have prepared.
-No, she doesn’t eat her patients! Any human flesh stored in her fridge is from other people, you silly.
--Yeah, I can’t in good conscience recommend her ‘famous breakfast scramble’.
-What’s she doing in the CoV? She’s the person who walked Troy through patching up Tyreen after Satellite. They couldn’t leave her running around after that. Apparently joined their caravan without complaint and has been riding around with them ever since.
-Has been known to dress up and give sermons or go out in the field for negotiations.
--Ugh. Torture takes so long. Don’t make her do that. We could have steak instead.
-Is mostly still around for Troy mending purposes nowadays.
Hecking spoilers for Grimeverse and the impending followup here! Kind of hinted at what Troy’s capable of before, but here he is doing it as hard as he can.
Contains only vague references to his crap health. Otherwise, user friendly.
His favorite other him is stern, imposing and frankly beautiful. Anyway, Troy thinks he’s beautiful. He’s biased in more ways than one since he is him, and since he has a favorite at all. It’s like-- maybe he shouldn’t with that last part, but of all the Troys in all the worlds he’s glimpsed, he’ll take this one any day. And he has, since the first time he saw him, down in the moonlit ruins and now when they can kind of be together sometimes in the downbeat hours between days when he’s full of pot smoke and willingness.
Their timelines don’t mesh real nicely, but they also don’t snap and shudder like some of the other ones he’s tried to fit into place around him for better views of what could be and more of himself.
This other him has no facial mods. He wears sensible prosthetics.
They both hate shoes.
Troy wonders if that’s part of what makes this one so easy to access. That really simple thing they happen to share.
He wonders a lot of things about how and why, but mostly he watches himself combing his bangs out of his face. He knows he had a church built here because it’s roughly contiguous with where the other him lives.
The other him and his family. He’s married and it’s complicated. He travels off-planet a lot and sometimes he just isn’t there for weeks. Other times, it’s like: they might as well share the same universe even though they pointedly don’t.
The other him crosses over the sand. He drops a bag on Troy’s lap. “You like grits, right?” he says, taking a seat beside him. He kicks his pretty, pedicured feet. “Sugar says try those. They’re high-protein.”
Troy hums. He opens the bag and peers inside. “I think that defeats the purpose of grits. Also, these are green.”
“They’re made out of peas. Somehow. Still taste like grits to me.”
Well, that’s as good a recommendation as he can get. He likes them. He;s just not the him who’s tried them. Plus, they do have that faint starchy smell like regular grits.
The other him puts his hand on his knee. He leans over and looks him right in his face. “You’re doing OK?”
“Ah, yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?” Troy tries to laugh it off, even knowing the other him won’t buy it.
“That’s not oxide under your eyes. What’s keeping you up?”
“I am. There’s some stuff I wanted to know, so I’ve been tripping the light fantastic. Maybe kind of a lot.”
“You could just ask me, you know,” other him chides. He gives him a squeeze before settling back to himself.
“Yeah, well, you…” he pauses, taking a deep breath and trying not to rub at his eyes. “No, I can’t. You never even tried the whole God King business.”
“Right.”
“You also have way different taste in women.”
The other him rolls his eyes. “Putting it mildly.” And they grin at each other, one set of ordinary teeth and Troy’s gleaming grills with full fangs in place.
“And I dunno. I’m just not into the other God King mes. They got no aspirations of their own, pretty much. Now here’s you, with your kids.”
“Our kids.”
“Never even tried it, but at least you want something that’s yours.”
“And you do too.” The other him stretches and sighs, his hands knitting over his head as he yawns. When he comes back, he’s all staid and serious about how he says. “Still won’t take care of yourself for any money, so here I am hauling pea grits across literally dimensions to feed your scrawny ass.”
Troy sighs. “You know, that schtick is getting…”
But the other him has vanished, leaving only his pretty footprints in the dust, this faint scent of chai against the night.
“Anyway,” Troy finishes to no one. “What I want? I’m not gonna live to see it through, but you know that. Or you’re kidding yourself. I was for a long time, but I know now. Anyway, you tell the kids I said hi. I miss ‘em.”
Went off script and way out of my own canon today, so tonight is pick up and play! Inspired by this anonymous submission to Incorrect Borderlands Quotes.
Some minor gore and drinking. Spoilers for Where The Red Fern Grows. Skip the tags if you want maximum surprise.
They think their visual processing firmware’s sprung a bug the first time they see her: the white skag.
She’s pale as the moonlight, rangy as a bandit child. She crests the sand dune with the sort of silence they’d expect from a feline or a selachimorph. She can’t be full-grown-- her hips are too thin and her tongue, as it swirls into the varkid body Mr. Chew opted not to finish, so short. Pale too. A pink ribbon.
They’ve heard stories about creatures like her, old hunter tales told around campfires and bottles of whiskey. She isn’t the sort of thing that gets written down in macroecological surveys. Besides that, she should, if her mother didn’t gobble her up as a weakling, be wearing enough dust that she looks like any other skag.
But no. She’s there. She’s so pale she seems luminous blue against the night. Her spines (she’s a spitter; that’s unusual in and of itself) have a gloss like nacre to them. The only dark part of her would be the grayish pits of her eyes. Her irises flash with Rayleigh scatters in the Outrunner headlights.
They think too at first that she must be starving, nibbling on a kill from another skag who’s not from her pack.
Perhaps she doesn’t have a pack. Then, how has she survived to adolescence?
Perhaps she isn’t eating because she needs to. She seems to be tasting, ripping off small, tender bits and taking her time to swallow. How refined, they want to say, but the clicking of their optics seems too much sound. Even Mr. Chew has gone quiet, sitting back on his haunches and observing despite the trail of curious drool that runs from his jaws.
So she belongs to someone. She might even have been engineered for that person.
A sauroraptor whistles in the distance; that or a person who’s versed at impersonating one.
The white skag lifts her head. She takes one more rip off of the body and disappears over the dune.
FL4K does their best to triangulate her footsteps, and that noise she might be answering. The night though sings on, full of bandits and more ordinary creatures, all masking any trace of her.
*
They meet with the other hunters in a bar at the edge of the Droughts. They hesitate to call them Vault hunters, since hunting Vaults is one thing they’ve done very little of since arriving on Pandora. Hunting Bandits on the other hand…
Anyway, they buy a bottle of moonshine and they light a candle, playing at this being a campfire story even though the evening’s too shot full of tension and battle for anybody with an inn at their disposal to risk sleeping under the stars. Humans are so fragile and they like their stories told just so. Whiskey for white skags, beer for comedy, blood everywhere for happy childhood memories.
They transload all of the pictures they took onto their ECHO and they pass it around. Most of the images make her look dim, but in one they snagged a lens flare and that almost replicates her glorious nature.
“Now that’s some Where The Red Fern grows shite,” Zane remarks once they’ve finished explaining the encounter.
“What in the who now?” mutters Moze. She has a mouthful of chilli from her second bowl.
“Old book. Just about his boy and his dogs. Got this bit about a magic fern in the middle and then the dogs die.”
“That sounds like a terrible book,” says FL4K. “What is the point of having a story about dogs if the dogs don’t live to see victory?”
“Well, they do, erm, that. They just also kinda die. The one goes out with a bang!”
“Anyway,” Amara changes the subject and also her shot glass. She’s chasing the moonshine with some floral cordial from offworld. She also leans across the table, batting the remains of her eyeshadow at FL4K. “I’m glad you got to see your albino skag.”
“Not albino. Leucistic. Albino skags are blind and not uncommon in inbred packs, although they rarely live long.”
Moze chews on her spoon. “I didn’t know that. Actually, I didn’t know what leucistic meant either and I’m not sure I’ll ever need to know that ever again and… Meat Thief, these are my beans.” She shoos the jabber off of her lap.
Before it can take the space beside Zane on the bench, Zane activates his DigiClone, occupying the area.
“I do not think she was mine,” FL4K says, thoughtfully now. She could be, though. They never failed to realize that. All they have to do is wait for her in the particular way that will earn her trust. First though, they must find her. And there’s a lot of smoking craters in town for that to be feasible for the moment.
Amara though lifts both of her glasses, “Well, if you want her, go get her! At least try.”
FL4K nods. “I will need meat. Do you think any of the survivors will mind if I appropriate some from the mass grave?”
“Just, ah, try to stick with the cultists and don’t let anybody see you,” says Moze.
*
They take a tattooed leg from the grave and carry it out into the dunes. Elpis crests at midnight. The desert still sings, or did it, they wonder, ever really stop?
The precise place where they saw the white skag no longer exists. Winds and other beasts have changed it, though the GPS coordinates remain. The varkid is long gone. FL4K slices open the leg and leaves it in a similar spot. They hold with their pack in the Outrunner, waiting and listening. They’ve brought water and silicone chew toys and half a dozen biofluids to rub on their fingers if that might tempt her.
A thrill sparks somewhere deep inside their wires. No, the archives were never like this, not even when ancient copies of Audubon turned up to be scanned, not even when an anonymous scientist brought over an Eridian epic she insisted described a real planet, but a dead one. The Grand Archivist didn’t even want to take that one. The day they convinced him rings awfully clear now in their circuits. They wonder, not for the first time, if things changed more in those hours than any of the ones before.
In the present, Mr. Chew raises his head. He turns over his shoulder.
FL4K follows. They think if it’s her back there, she must be awfully wily. It makes sense the way she’d stand out in full sun.
The white skag is not alone. She trots around the feet of her master. Mistress, rather.
“You. I was not expecting.”
Tyreen shoulders her rifle. She smiles. She shrugs. Aside from the careless omission of the left sleeve of her jacket, her hunting gear seems practical, especially compared to her costumes. Her rifle has been used, and not that long ago. Without makeup, her lips are a pale tan color and she’s got oxide in the pits of her eyes.
The white skag circles her, once and then again.
It knows not to touch her or come too close, but it also knows her gravity. So, they have been together, she and her. They have been together for a long while.
They shoulder their rifle as well. It’s not like this “God Queen” can hurt them, or that they’d let her hurt their pack. Besides, she is very much alone, save for the white skag.
She’s also snickering at them. So she knows. She seems like she knows.
“Is she yours?” they ask.
“I dunno. Is she?”
“I am uncertain what need you would have for a hunting dog, considering your siren powers.”
Tyreen takes a handful of steps closer and the white skag trots ahead of her, coming close enough that Broodless puts her head up. Mr. Chew sniffs. Oh, the bodies and the strange blood he must smell on her.
“Serious question there. Is she mine?” says Tyreen.
“You are not trying to play mind games with an ex-archivist.”
“I’m not playing anything. Do you want her? Like you said, I don’t need a dog.”
And the white skag, she lays belly down in the sand. She looks to them and to the pack. Her eyes flash, but she stays so calm.
FL4K thinks. If they had a tongue, they think they would lick their lips. As things are, the white skag does just that, her pink ribbon tongue flickering out above the ground.
“Yes,” they say. “I want her very much.”
“Good, good,” croons Tyreen. She upends her rifle, dumping the bullets out. “I can help you with that. Walk with me.”
Nodding, they do likewise. They motion for their pack to follow.
The four of them follow the two into the desert night where everything is blue, only specially Tyreen, whose pelt seems to beam with laughter even through her silence.
