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Lup dips her toes into the ring of water just beside her hammock. She and Taako are outside, cooking salmon over a campfire that Lup conjured. Merle is off connecting with the common population, while Barry and Magnus search for the Light in the Starblaster. Two weeks into their fifth year and she is already itching for something more.
The plane they’ve landed on isn’t inhabited, and it’s lush and beautiful and utterly suffocating – the air is thick and heavy, and still, her brother’s decided to have a campout. She’d shrugged, gone along with it – like, Gods, who cares. Lucretia’s sitting in a shaded corner, away from the commotion of sizzling pans and Lup’s vague babbling.
“Cap’nport,” she hums with a slight smile, folding her arms atop the gnomes head. He’s closer to the fire pit than Lucretia is, a floral wet wrap around his forehead. The damp of it soaks into the elbows of her red coat.
“Lup,” he says, slow and tired. The haziness of this planet has truly been affecting all of them. Lup’s affected in other ways, however; she’s impartial to the soft drag of exhaustion, only getting more wound and keyed up. Her hair is frizzing, just as it did on the first plane they landed on, and her ears and fingers are constantly twitching in an anxious mess that isn’t unfamiliar. She’s restless; she fucking hates sitting still and waiting for something, and that is all she has been doing for the past five years. She’s a creature of sun and light – not the dark of night and an endless gunfire-ignition longing.
“So boring,” she drawls, pulling at Davenport’s whiskers; he hardly has the energy to swat her long fingers away. She makes her way over to Lucretia (and she’s so beautiful even with the sheen of sweat on her brow, her eyes intensely focused on the journal in her hands, the fifth edition of a storyline that seems like it won’t ever end) and she sits next to her. Lucretia’s mouth goes tight at her presence.
“Heya, Hugo,” Lup says, peering over the girl’s shoulder to sneak a look at her pages. Her handwriting is small, sharp, and nearly illegible. Lup can recognize her own name, the big swell up and down and out of the L with a little curlicue in the corner, but everything else just looks like scribbles. She catches only a few other things – Davenport, Taako, mostly other names and some scratched out words – before Lucretia tilts her book away, hugging it to her body.
“Hi,” Lucretia replies, straightening herself against the tree she leans on. She closes her journal and tucks her legs underneath herself, placing the journal between her folded legs. Lup’s heart aches.
Lucretia is so fucking cagey. She has been trying to get her to open up, crack open her ribs and find a home inside, but Lucretia won’t let her. It’s been five years now and she remains closed-off as ever, and that hurts. Lup has never been too miffed about what people have thought about her – she’s herself, who fucking cares, she knows she surpasses those who stoop so low to fuck her over – but Lucretia is one of six other people that Lup is stuck with for the possible end of time, and she’d like it if they at least talked sometime. Taako is her brother, yeah, but she can’t rely on family for the rest of her life. Merle is weird. Barry is a nerd. Magnus is aggressive and so goddamn loud. Lup bets Davenport would rather fuck the ship than talk to her. So it’s not like she has much to choose from in terms of acquaintances.
Even so, she has bonded with the boys. Davenport, offhand and slightly tipsy, had told her of his days in college, how he projectile vomited on his instructor the first day he tried a flying simulation. Barry was as close to a best friend as Lup had gotten thus far – he knew about her dumb crush on Lucretia, had suggested she go for it, and she had tried. She had been trying for the last five years, Gods above.
Lup just wants a connection.
But she also recognizes the fear in Lucretia’s eyes, knows intimately why she locks herself in her room, why she shies from touch, why she writes as if it’s the shoreline and she is drowning. The guilt drags her down like rushing waves, pulling her out to sea and leaving her to choke.
“You’re terribly quiet, Luce,” Lup notes, and immediately regrets it when the human’s shoulders draw tight.
“Don’t call me that,” she says sharply. Her hands twitch and reach for her book before pausing, running fingers over the cover but not picking it up. Refusing to open it and let Lup see inside.
Dinner is a quiet affair. They’re covered in grime and sweat and Lup could really use a change of clothes and a cold shower, but there’s only the probably-natural hot spring and the clothes on her back.
Lup devours the salmon Taako made and, of course, it’s perfect, unsurprising even with the unfortunate weather.
“This is awful,” she jokes as she takes bite after bite. It’s buttery and tangy and so good, but she and Taako aren’t the best at genuine affection; they love each other, but it’s buried under the jokes and goofs they share. She shows her love by fucking with him.
“You’re awful,” Taako counters, cutting an elbow into her side. She laughs, high and loud. Feathered things – not quite birds – erupt from the earth around them.
From her seat behind the fire, Lup can hardly see Lucretia. She’s still in the dark, isolated corner of their camp, reading and writing by the light of an enchanted moonstone that hangs from her neck, and the light throws her in an ethereal blue glow. Every time Lup sees her, she’s struck by her beauty. Lucretia is plain – she doesn’t wear makeup, she has a few zits near her hairline, and she doesn’t do anything particularly special to her hair – but there is something about her that is raw. She has wide blue eyes that glitter when she has a good idea, a full, pretty mouth that Lup is literally fucking dying to kiss, and a mind that’s filled with such wonderful, messy things – Lup wants to know. She wants to know who this sad, mysterious girl is. The family she left behind. What she does when she’s locked in her room. Who she has loved.
Lup leans into Taako when she’s done eating, stretching obnoxiously and pulling at his hair. She remembers how odd it had looked short – it didn’t fit him. Despite the hilarity of the moment, seeing Taako like that was strange. There was a long, terrifying month where they were both dealing-capital-D with the situation they were in, and he stopped feeling like her twin brother.
That’s past, now. He has his long, curly bleach-blond hair back, and she loves him.
“You’re so fucking clingy,” Taako says, playfully shoving at her and wrinkling his nose.
“It’s just so damn hot,” Lup gripes, falling dramatically into his lap. He shrieks indignantly and gives a half-assed attempt to shove her off. “’S got me all over the place, Koko, I can’t fucking wait to get out of here.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” he says with a low laugh, reaching over to pull his sharp nails through Lup’s hair, lightly scratching her scalp.
Faintly, she hears Lucretia’s book snap closed. She doesn’t think much of it, until she senses the girl getting up, moving closer.
“Is that how little this world means to you?” she asks, her voice deathly quiet. She’s hardly audible over the crackle of the fire. Her moonstone is still glowing, lighting up her breast and chin, painting pale in the hollows of her cheeks and eyes like child telling a horror story.
Taako gives a snort. Lup jerks up, starting to stand, but Taako beats her to the punch.
“I know you’re all about, like,” he starts, waving his hand lazily. “Common good and justice or whatever, Creesh, but frankly, I don’t care.” He shrugs, and Lup can see Lucretia’s expression harden into something dark. “Honestly, the only thing I’m lookin’ out for is me and Lup. Y’know? Like, if you bozos can’t handle yourselves, Imma just leave—LUP, OW.”
Lup gives him a pressing look, retracting her fist from his solar plexus.
“Shut up,” she hisses from the corner of her mouth. She flashes her eyes to where Lucretia is standing, but –
She’s gone.
Lup presses her hand to her forehead, lowering herself from her seat into the dirt. “Shit, Taako.”
Lucretia hides herself in the canopy she had claimed her own. Her hammock is there, sleeping bag hanging precariously off the open side. She crawls in, wraps herself up. She cracks open her personal journal.
It troubles me how little our crew cares about the wellbeing of the planes we land on. Taako seems to have no remorse for the four planes that have been consumed in our wake, and I don’t know if I am disgusted or if I long to have that kind of pain tolerance. My heart is a bleeding one, and I can’t help but mourn the lives that have gone to been destr have been demolished due to the horror we lead here. Sometimes I wish I could be so callous. I wish I could see terrible things and feel okay, so long as the person I love is safe. But I want to save everyone. I want nothing to be wasted, taken for granted, left behind. Because everything is. We take every miracle we receive as if it’s nothing.
Her hand starts shaking violently. She forces herself to stop.
They have done nothing to help the creatures they’ve met. Almost every plane has ended in disaster. Even when they collect the Light, entire worlds are still destroyed, swallowed by that pulsing, opalescent black that strikes unsurmountable fear into her very essence. It rips her apart, nerve by ligament by muscle, and she has thought about killing herself sometimes, when things got too bad – but she thought about what would happen if she were not there to write. What would happen to the life? What would happen to the planes no one else would know of?
There’s too much. Anxiety clogs her veins, fills her and overflows and she can’t stop shaking.
“Gods above,” she hisses out on an exhale. She curls into herself, tucking her head inside her sleeping bag; her journal falls out from the hammock, hitting the dirt. Her pen follows.
“I can’t fucking do this,” is what she whispers into the dark, unfortunate night.