Chapter Text
It was the perfect plan. Well, okay, until it wasn't, he guesses, but that wasn't that important, because he also had the perfect Plan B. Probably? Well, it's not like there was any going back, anyway, all or nothing now.
He arched his neck to look out the window of his getaway ship as the sounds of sirens and alarms started seeming rather distant. His hands flew over the glowing board in front of him without having to look at it - this, after all, was the part he was used to. The behind-the-scenes. The programming bit, he knew that easy. Somewhere in the hazy corners of his mind, he began to consider that he didn't exactly, well, know how to fly this thing. Or, more specifically, land it. But he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind for the time being. That wasn't important. What was important was losing the trail of the entire squad after him, and then choosing a planet he could hide out on. And then. Then landing on it.
He turned his eyes back to the control panel and pulled up a map of surrounding space, trying to plot out a course. After a while he plots something out that he's just mad enough to attempt, but probably no one else will be, and it leaves him (hopefully) on route to intersect with a planet in its orbit, roughly 93,000,000 miles from the larger star it circles. There wasn't much information on it, it was rather out of the way, and its inhabitants appeared to barely venture off the planet and had never made contact with any others. It was a dream. It was, well, it was perfect.
With that settled, he busies himself preparing for when he gets there, finding everything he might need, just in case. He takes special care to set the transformation device at the front of the ship, so he'd remember to blend in, this time, wow. It was all going quite well. After a rocky start, at least Plan B was going off without a hitch.
Well, until it wasn't, because right, landing, he should have read a guide or something when he had all that spare time floating through dangerous slum galaxies and asteroid belts, but he spent most of that time staring at everything, because if something was going to get him he was damn well going to see it coming, at least. He just overlooked death at his own hands - or stupidity, as the case may be.
He started frantically typing and pushing and pulling things because, yeah, that always works, that'll get him down safely. He definitely got a bunch of alarms blaring and lights flashing, that is for sure. He managed to slow the ship down a bit, at least, and aimed to crash on some flat ground. Which, hey, totally succeeded there, that was good.
As the dust settles, he tries to logically assess the situation. The crash was pretty bad, but the ship took most of the damage, he thinks. He's not losing a lot of blood, just a few scratches here and there. He carefully tries moving each of his limbs one at a time. Arm, arm, arm, arm, leg, leg, tail, neck, check, everything in working order. He wishes his head wasn't pounding, and maybe that it weren't so dark, because it's pitch black and that's a little freaky? He slowly blinks his second eyelids, seeing if there's dust to clear out of his eyes, but nothing changes. He waits for his pupils to dilate enough for vision, but again it looks like a no go. What a shitty planet, he decides, before carefully starting the business of extracting himself from what remains of his escape pod. The doors on the sides won't open, so he kicks open the ceiling hatch and suddenly something crumbly starts pouring into his little space, and he quickly digs through it to get to the surface.
Right, crashed, he buried himself a little there, that explains the lack of light. Right. Duh.
There's not much between him and surface from there, but as soon as he hits surface he regrets it, he regrets it in all kinds of ways. He shuffles his face back into the ground, less crumbly and dark, more soft and green? But much, much less bright, oh wow, that is awful, hopefully whatever lives on this planet stays inside when it's this disgustingly bright and hot out.
All he can hear is the ringing, like metal's still scrapping in his brain, and the light is only making this headache doubly worse, and he doesn't remember his first crash feeling this terrible. It takes him a while, a long while, before he registers another noise, and finally lifts his head, hissing and squinting passed the light, and there's someone there. Yelling, maybe? Everything's sort of foggy, it's hard to tell, maybe that is a normal volume. It sounds far away, though. He's pretty sure this is because of the crash, and not a weird thing about the atmosphere on this planet.
The... well, he doesn't want to assume, the whatever slash whomever that is, they're thin, but pretty tall, compared to some species, and they walk with a stick and, he thinks, maybe, a limp. He categorizes this as, probably, a deformity that is, while not uncommon judging by the well-designed walking stick, probably not a trait shared by the entire species. Whether it's a genetic anomaly or if the species just doesn't heal like his does is yet to be determined. He stores it away for further study because he's oddly curious about it now. Curiosity, not surprisingly, is also not doing wonders for his cognitive functions, either.
The... human? He thinks that was the word he absently read in the report, although he's not in the best state for drawing conclusions, he'll take it. The human, who is maybe tall, and thin, and has an unfortunate mop of hair on the top of their head, is pacing, which is just as unfortunate, given it probably hurts to walk, given they are limping, come on. They're also holding what looks like a communication device, but it doesn't really looking like they're using it. Maybe thinking of who to contact, he's not sure, but they're muttering/talking/maybe yelling at it.
As he tries to form a sentence, maybe a plea, but his throat feels weird and raw and just sort of wrong, it occurs to him that he can't understand what the human is saying and, therefore, probably they wouldn't understand him in turn. And he left all his equipment in the ship, of course, because he was thinking this planet was uncomfortably pitch dark and he'd just crashed and also he was scared, so. He lets his attempt at words dilute into a groan as he buries his face back into the yielding ground, and is starting to think that now that the rush is dying down, one of his legs might actually be a little broken after all? And it's trying to heal itself way too quickly for the position and pain he is in, and he'd like that to stop, ideally.
It's possible Plans A and B were not as clever and well thought out as he'd initially given himself credit for, he admits, right as he also decides the best course of action now is to let himself pass out from pain and deal with all of this later, if he's alive, or whatever.