Work Text:
V—
Suit up? Got something I could use your help with.
—Ryder
Vetra didn't exactly relish the idea of stepping out onto Elaaden's surface—even with the vault running, the place was hot—but better here than Voeld. She set down her datapad and made for the door of the armory.
Ryder hadn't arrived in the cargo bay yet. Probably in the process of persuading someone else to come with them. She went over her assault rifle, just to be safe, made sure the newest mod was set in there securely. By the time she'd double-checked the seals on her armor, someone gave a soft huff and dropped down to the cargo bay floor from above.
"You're going to break a leg doing that," she said, though she couldn't keep the smile out of her voice.
"If I break a leg, it will be out there, not in here." Ryder emerged from behind the Nomad, cheeks flushed, helmet tucked beneath one arm. "Don't tell Lexi, though."
"Only because the ambient lecturing would haunt me."
Ryder chuckled. "I hear her in my sleep, sometimes. Telling me to eat my vegetables. Ready to go?"
Vetra's height allowed her to easily search the bay behind Ryder; no one had accompanied her down. "Where's…?"
"Oh." Was Vetra imagining it, or had the flush on Ryder's cheeks gone deeper? "Just the two of us today. If you don't mind?"
"Mind? No." Was this about…? It couldn't be. She refocused. "Easy to get overwhelmed out there, is all. Are you sure—?"
"We're going somewhere out of the way. Just an errand, honestly." Ryder patted the Nomad. "Should be able to outrun anything really nasty, yeah? This thing's extra-fast now."
"True. And you've done a lot of work on the surface."
"We have done a lot of work." She pulled her helmet on. "Ready?"
At least the interior of the Nomad was still cool, compared to the brutal sun. Ryder skirted the Paradise and headed east, well away from any of the landmarks they usually passed. She was uncharacteristically quiet; something about the whole thing jarred Vetra's nerves.
"You sure everything's okay?" she asked, after five minutes of silence had worn her down.
"What?" Ryder fiddled with the controls. "Of course. Why?"
"You're just...awfully quiet."
"Ouch. Does this mean I talk too much, usually?"
"I'm not complaining." She liked Ryder's talking. She didn't have Peebee's motor, but she knew how to break a tense silence. And she was funny, something humorous usually pervading her words, her tone. Even when she was talking to someone else, and Vetra was just standing across the cargo bay, she found herself smiling.
Ryder glanced sideways at her, hesitated, and then said, "It's…it's something fun. Trust me?"
"Something fun," Vetra repeated. She didn't look too closely at the trust part. Truth was, she did trust Ryder, or she'd have already bailed out and started running back to the Paradise three minutes ago.
"Not an ambush," Ryder clarified. "Something good."
Vetra peered, a little dubiously, out the front viewscreen of the Nomad. Nothing but rolling sand dunes out there, as far as she could tell, and that big worm—still far enough off in the distance to seem small.
"Not the worm," Ryder added with a shudder. "I really don't want to fight that thing."
"No? Not the blaze of glory you're looking for?"
"Glory, for me, doesn't involve being dismembered."
Vetra chuckled at that, and Ryder laughed along, the way she always did at her own jokes. Some of the tension eased away.
"Okay," she agreed. "What's the occasion?"
"Occasion?" Ryder adjusted their course a few more degrees north. "Uh, nothing really. Just a thought I had." She looked over at Vetra again; her mouth wasn't visible through the helmet, but her eyes were tight. "The good kind, I want to reiterate."
"I think I've learned something new about you."
"Yeah?"
"You're a bad liar."
Ryder snorted. "That's not new. Look, give it about two minutes, and you'll see."
They settled back into a moderately more comfortable silence. Vetra's mind worked, trying to figure out what Ryder was up to. She usually wasn't so deliberately vague. What did they need out here—so far from New Tuchanka and the Paradise, where not so much as a salvager pinged their radar? And why just the two of them? It didn't make any sense.
Unless…
She tried not to think about it, to imagine it. Every time it crossed her mind, in those rare idle moments or the long breaths before sleep, she found something painfully hopeful swelling in her chest. But she also wasn't blind; Ryder had been flirting with her for months, more earnestly these last few weeks. Maybe the surprise was related. To that. Maybe she intended to act on it.
The mere idea was simultaneously panic-inducing and thrilling. Vetra quashed it down.
"We're here," Ryder announced, just as they crested the very top of a dune.
It was a long, long way down. The tallest of these piles of sand she'd seen yet. More of them rolled out toward the horizon, barren of life, the wind slowly, incrementally adjusting the shape of them.
"Okay," Ryder said, stopping the Nomad. "Tell me if this is stupid. I thought you might want to blow off some steam. With everything that's been going on...I don't know. Racing around H-047c was awesome, right? I figured here, it's maybe not as fast, but at least we can open the windows."
"The windows open?" Vetra said.
"Gil helped me rig it."
Ryder watched her, brow taut again. Vetra remembered shrieking with laughter on that glorified rock amidst all of Ryder's enthusiastic cursing, Drack slapping the back of both of their seats with glee. Weird thing to get so much pleasure out of, but...she couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed so hard, or so freely.
And Ryder had remembered. Noted it, even.
"So," Ryder said. "Wanna drive?"
Vetra's brow plates lifted of their own accord. "You're letting me drive?"
"Don't tell the others. They'll think I'm playing favorites." She winked, the warmth of a smile coming back into her eyes.
Vetra laughed, a little stunned with the happiness Ryder had dropped in her lap. "You're on, Ryder."
Ryder started pulling out of her safety harness. "Let's get this show on the road, then."
Vetra scrambled out of the Nomad to switch places. The bottom of the dune looked even further, the slope even steeper, just standing at the top of it without a machine between her and it.
"I don't want to be a spoilsport, but we should probably keep our helmets on," Ryder said, coming around the Nomad.
"Yeah. Safety."
"No." Ryder grimaced. "Sand. Bleh. Gets all dusty and weird on my skin. And my eyelashes. And other places—you don't even want to know."
Ryder clambered up past her, into the passenger seat, and Vetra moved around to the driver's side.
"It's gonna be great," Ryder said, strapping her safety harness on. "This is the highest dune in the area."
"How do you know?"
"I'm the Pathfinder, aren't I?"
"Are you also the Dunefinder?"
Ryder snorted, bouncing in her seat a little. "Maybe we should shorten the title to Finder. Think I could get that past Tann?"
"You'd need to find his sense of humor first." Vetra ran her fingers over the controls, powering the Nomad back up. "I can't believe you brought me all the way out here to do this."
The humor in Ryder's face faded; she reached over to clasp Vetra's shoulder. Even through armor, she startled at the touch—how easy it was, maybe, or how good that point of connection felt.
"It's not so far," she said. "And the payoff's worth it. Come on." Her hand moved to fiddle with something on the center console; the windows on either side of them opened. The smell and heat of Elaaden came in, hot and dry and acrid.
Vetra backed the Nomad up, just a bit, and then boosted forward.
For a moment, they kept their forward momentum, the quick jolt off the precipice enough to take them from the steep slope. But then the air stilled—that turning point, slowing, slowing, stopped—and they plummeted, picking up speed until the wheels of the Nomad slammed to the sand. Vetra jolted forward against her harness. Ryder laughed, a single, delighted shout as they careened downward, picking up speed.
There was nothing for them to hit, just an endless sea of sand, so Vetra kept the barest touch on the controls. She saw what Ryder intended with this spot in particular; there was a low rise off the basin at the bottom of this dune, one that would shoot them off into the air pretty damn far, given the speed they were moving at.
"Hang on!" she shouted. She punched the newly-upgraded boost.
There was another second of the tires eating up sand, and then the Nomad soared up toward Elaaden's clear blue sky, the ground far behind. Vetra was laughing now, too, and Ryder was cursing, wild and delighted beside her.
They were airborne for maybe five seconds, at most. It felt much longer, a perfect, endless moment, the wind rushing through the Nomad, sand grit peppering Vetra's armor.
The Nomad landed again; Vetra let it trundle to a stop on its own, coming to a halt in the sand. Ryder wheezed beside her, pounding the dash with her fist. "Holy shit," she said. "Holy shit, that was—"
Something pinged against the Nomad's shields; Ryder cut off, head turning toward the noise.
A few red blips appeared on their radar. "Shit," Vetra muttered.
A spray of gunfire spattered Ryder's side of the Nomad. She ducked beneath the line of the open window, her hand reaching over to the middle console; Vetra hit the accelerator, swerving away so that the attack would hit their rear instead. Ryder cursed again, hand grasping, and finally connected. The windows closed.
"Scavengers," she said, her voice still hoarse from the ride down. "Damn it—"
"Did you get a count?"
"Saw five, could be more."
The dunes, even the lower one they'd launched from, were too high; they'd be sitting ducks while the Nomad crawled up it. Maybe the shields would last, maybe they wouldn't.
Vetra pulled around, putting them against the dune. "We can take them."
"I did not bring you out here to get shot at—"
"What, you didn't tick that box on your something fun checklist?"
Ryder laughed, still a little wild, but she threw off her harness and pulled her rifle free. "Fine. We'll do it your way."
Vetra dropped out of the Nomad and ducked behind one of the tires; the line of fire followed her. She heard Ryder shout, the sizzle of an electric current. When she popped back up above the tire, two targets were stiff from the lash of Ryder's overload. She picked off one of the scavengers while Ryder took the other.
Three left. Ryder's count had been right. Vetra got a concussive shot off; Ryder's Viper cracked a split second later, finishing the job. The last two had learned from their fellows, scrambling into cover, but Ryder was on the move, starting her run across the sand.
"Get ready!" she shouted; the comm compensated for the volume, making her voice tinny in Vetra's helmet.
They'd perfected this maneuver recently; Ryder launched herself into the air with her jump-jet, shot off a burst of flame, and dropped. One of the targets staggered out of cover, frantically trying to douse the fire. Vetra shot at the flailing scavenger until he went down. His last companion was surprised enough by the display to screw up as Ryder approached, not even getting his gun around to aim at her before she opened fire.
Vetra scanned for more targets, but the sand was clear, the new silence ringing, punctuated only by Ryder's ragged breathing through the comm. Two crates—barely enough for cover—and some other scrap littered the sand near Ryder. Not enough to justify a run all the way out here.
"Nothing worth taking." Ryder's voice was back to its usual volume, though still hoarse; she started back toward Vetra and the Nomad. "Can't believe they came out this far."
"Must be getting desperate. There's a lot more legitimate business on this planet lately. Probably running them out."
Ryder sighed, loud and echoing over the comm. "I—I'm sorry. I thought we were clear."
"Ryder—"
"Something good, more like, 'Come hang out with me, we'll be outnumbered and unexpectedly shot at—'"
"Are you going to keep moping, or are we going to take that dune again?"
Ryder stopped short, head tipping back to look up at Vetra. "What?"
"Come on," Vetra said, slinging her rifle back into place. "As long as you're letting me drive, I'm getting my money's worth."
She expected Ryder to laugh and shake it off—maybe clasp her shoulder in passing again. Instead, Ryder moved forward, reached up, and hugged her, armor and all, her arms looped around Vetra's carapace like they belonged there naturally.
She was warm, all the way through. It had nothing to do with Elaaden's blistering heat.
Ryder pulled back before Vetra could react, though she still felt the weight of it, as if Ryder remained pressed against her. "You're wonderful," Ryder said, with a kind of desperate awe in her voice, "you know that?" She patted Vetra's shoulder and edged around her to the Nomad. "Again, then."
Ryder told her about the roller coasters she'd revered as a teenager while the Nomad pulled them laboriously toward the precipice of the dune, and Vetra—skeptical as she was, wary as she was—started to believe that Ryder meant it, all that flirting she'd been doing and more. The idea was still panic-inducing, but also about as thrilling as plummeting off the dune again, wind whipping past them, Ryder laughing beside her.