Chapter Text
She’s not built for this at all, Eurydice realises, as she watches him practically tear her ship apart while looking for the tools needed to repair his dead comm. There’s a reason why she’s chosen to avoid living with people for such a long time, and this is one of them.
“A single minute,” she fumes, as she surveys the damage from her spot in the one communal hallway. “I leave you alone for a single minute, and you somehow manage to- to upend a shelf that’s been doing just fine on its own for a good what, ten years now?”
“I was looking,” he starts, but Eurydice cuts him off with a wave.
“You could’ve asked ,” she retorts, tossing him an old screwdriver that had been the reason for her absence earlier. “Maybe you would’ve known that I’d been on the hunt for it. Maybe my shelf would still be standing.”
“Or maybe,” Orph counters, catching the screwdriver with ease and setting it on a metal table drilled into a wall, “it was high time you got a new shelf.” He gestures towards the dilapidated heap of metal on the floor with his booted foot, working to take his comm off his wrist.
Eurydice practically exhales steam from her nostrils. The scalding kind, mind you, not the chilly wisps of smoke that emerge from the packets of dry ice she used to buy as a kid with her limited allowance. She wants to fly right back to Mars, drop this asshole off, and leave before anyone can catch her or deem her suspicious.
She doesn’t. Instead, she says, “I’ve got a job to do, Orph, and maybe you can help me out with it.” Eurydice’s willing to bet at least a hundred credits that this little revolutionary has never seen an asteroid blow up in his life, what with the way his entire face comes to life like a lightbulb.
***
“Strap yourself into the co-pilot’s seat,” she says. “Magic show’s about to start.”
He’s not sure if she’s supposed to sound condescending, but he’s not taking any chances. “Alright,” Orpheus says carefully, tucking his comm and the screwdriver into his pocket.
It’s been a few hours since he’d been discovered, and the two of them have hardly exchanged a word since their first encounter. He finds that he’s alright with that; conversing with a stranger has never been one of his strong suits, let alone a stranger with whom he’s gotta be careful.
The chip sits heavily in his pocket; it feels more like a ten-tonne stone instead of an almost weightless chunk of metal containing dirt on the SEA. “So,” he says, pulling the seatbelt over his denim jacket, running a hand through his hair and wincing as he makes contact with the bruise. “Uh, what’s the magic show?”
“The magic show,” Edie says, without looking up from where she’s charting out a course, “is me grabbing an asteroid with some nice clamps that come out of the ship.” She wipes her hands on her pants before saying, “I blow it up afterwards.”
“You’re a junker?” Orpheus blurts, his statement coming out as a question.
“Unfortunately,” Edie replies bluntly, an undercurrent of mirth in her voice. With a wave of her hand, a glitching map of the Asteroid Belt appears before both of their eyes. “Go on,” she says. “Choose one for me.”
He hesitates; it’s a weird request to ask of her stowaway, but Orpheus goes through with it anyway. “That one,” Orpheus says, pointing at a relatively large asteroid on the map. Squinting, he reads, “109155.”
“109155,” she repeats. “Alright.” She glances at Orpheus, who shifts nervously under the weight of her gaze. “Strap yourself in, Orph,” Edie says, grinning wickedly.
“For wha-!” he starts, but he’s cut off by the ship lurching forward. Orpheus swears that his organs have shifted slightly; he’s never going to get used to space travel. That’s why he’d delegated himself to do groundwork on Earth, collecting intel instead of flying across the Solar System.
“Warned you,” Edie shrugs, when he cries out sharply. She veers the ship off to the side, laughing as he lets loose a string of curses that he’ll probably never repeat. “Why’d you stow away on a junker ship if you’re scared of flying?” she asks, fiddling with a few commands.
“I’m not scared ,” Orpheus scoffs over the rumbling of the engine, “I just don’t like flying. Besides, how was I supposed to know that it was a junker ship? I was half-delirious when I stumbled upon your little contraption.”
“Uh-huh,” Edie says, pressing a button and watching with satisfaction as two gigantic grabbers unfurled from the sides of the Songbird . “By the way, Orph, if you need first aid, I’ve got a kit somewhere in the bathroom.” When he looks at her like she’s grown a second head, Edie puffs out of her nose and says, “I can’t have you dying on me. God knows that I need a new ship.”
Orpheus watches as she extends and maneuvers the grabbers towards an asteroid that looks like it vaguely resembles the glitchy image on the map that he’d pointed at earlier, only around a hundred times larger. “Is- Is that 109155 ?” he sputters, as Edie grins, the clamps gripping hard to the enormous, leering hunk of rock.
“What did you think it’d look like?” she asks, retracting the clamps and slowly moving the asteroid closer to the ship itself. “Did you seriously think that it’d be the size of a speck of dust? There’s something called scaling, Orph.”
(He’s got a feeling that “I know that” is going to become his catchphrase by the time his stint on her ship ends.)
She tinkers with a few controls and turns to him, eyes twinkling with mischief. “Look,” she says, motioning for him to push a brightly coloured button that’s been labelled ‘DESTRUCTION.’ “Honour is yours, sir. Go on; blow up the space rock.”
He looks at her. “Blow it up? You want m-”
“Just do it,” she says. “Blow up the damn rock.”
And he presses the button with barely hidden glee, watching as the rock explodes before his very eyes, a kaleidoscope of monotonously earthy tones. It’s beautiful; so beautiful that he forgets just for a second that he’s stuck in space. “Guess it really is magic,” he mutters to himself. Looking at Eurydice, he asks, “What do you do now?”
She shrugs. “Collect the pieces that are valuable, I guess.”
He wrinkles his nose; that does not sound fun. “Cool,” he says awkwardly, and he stands up, pulling out his comm. Holding it up by the strap, he says, “I hope that won’t mind if I just, uh, head over and get this fixed real quick.”
Orpheus gets out of the seat before Edie says anything, padding down the hall to a room that she’d shown him to earlier.
***
“Please,” he whispers to himself, as he tightens the last screw. He’s just spent the past thirty minutes attempting to rewire the contraption. “Please just tur-”
His comm whirs back to life, the screen flashing on and revealing a very reasonable sixteen missed calls from Jason. Swiping one of them, he crosses his toes in his boots. “Hello?” Orpheus asks, as Jason’s voice finally comes through the receiver. “Jase?”
“ Orpheus ,” Jason says, his voice filled with relief. “Where the- you know what? I’m not even gonna ask. Just send me your coordinates and we’ll be on our way. You’ve caused quite the stir, you know that? Swiping away that chip right under Hades’ nose.”
“Give me a second,” Orpheus says, clicking around on his comm just to partially drown out Jason’s commentary. He doesn’t want to hear about the incident. A beat, and then, “You got that?”
“Shit,” Jason swears. “We’re out near Saturn.” There’s a moment of silence, before Jason asks, “The Asteroid Belt? Why the hell are you in the Asteroid Belt?”
He exhales loudly through his nose. “Long story,” Orpheus says, promptly deciding to leave out the fact that he owes a specific someone a new ship and a couple hundred credits. “Just- how long until you can come and grab me?”
“Two weeks, give or take,” Jason says, and Orpheus can almost see him shrugging or running a hand through his sandy head of hair. “Stay out of trouble until we can come and get you, alright? Oh, and Calais told me to say hi.”
“Cool,” Orpheus says. “Okay.”
He cuts the line. Calais , Orpheus thinks. He does not want to think about him right now.
“Who’s Calais?”
He jumps a foot into the air. There stands Edie, leaning against the doorframe with a sly smile on her face.
“Have you been there the whole time ?” Orpheus demands, his heart in his throat. “You-!”
“Should’ve closed the door. Unclosed doors are an invitation for eavesdroppers, Orpheus ,” she says, grinning as he turns a shade paler. “I should’ve known, actually. I’ve got a renowned Awakening member on my hands, don’t I?”
“You won’t sell me out, will you?
“If you tell me who Calais is, I’ll think about it.”
Two more weeks of this , Orpheus thinks to himself, trying not to explode. Talking to Edie is like talking to a temperamental toddler. Two fucking weeks.
“A friend,” Orpheus says simply, blinking. “A friend who- uh- harbours feelings for me .”
“And do you harbour them back?” she asks with air quotes, raising an eyebrow in his direction.
“Not necessarily,” he admits. This is the first time he's really talked to anyone openly about the whole Calais incident since the other boy had confessed last month. “At least, I don’t think so?”
“So,” she says sagely. “It’s a classic case of unrequited love, eh?”
He hums what seems like an affirmation. There’s silence for a moment, until Edie snorts, “Good luck with that.”
“I thought you’d give me some advice,” Orpheus says, a little crestfallen.
“I don’t have any,” she says simply. "I"m not an expert on love. I'm not an expert on anything, frankly." She turns to leave, but before she heads back to the cockpit, she says, “I won’t sell you out. Thanks for the conversation. It was," she hesitates, "nice."
Edie’s a weird one. Orpheus decides that he likes her, to a degree.