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The neuro-port itches at the base of your skull as they plug you in. You brace your mind as the sense of a being much larger than yourself rushes in-- the airlocks, the cameras, the propulsion systems. You breathe out and are no longer aware of the itch. Instead you feel the silence and the light and the cold that is the glorious emptiness of space.
Your name is Jade Harley and you are a fucking awesome spaceship.
You’re not sure who pulled the strings that meant you left the helm during Dave’s shift, but you’re thankful for it. Waiting to come back down from helmstatus is spent listening to Dave ramble about your mutual friends and ship gossip, lazily logging it in a chart when you reply. This is much better, in your opinion, than the standard question-response dialogue you are supposed to be having-- Helmshuman Harley. You have been unplugged from the ship Mauretania of her Imperial Condescension’s fleet. Are you aware of yourself and your location? Blah blah blah, etcetera. Dave could get in trouble for doing this, technically. Maybe on some other ship he would. But his supervisor is Maryam and she likes Dave. Also she’s good friends with one of your pilots, so it makes sense she’s willing to let things slide for your comfort. Plus, her supervisor is Gamzee Makara, and Makara hates Dave. But in a romantic way, you mean.
You’re pretty sure Dave fucked him once? You’re not really sure.
What you know for sure is that Dave is not really down with the quadrants thing. Not for him, as it turns out.
Anyway, this means that it’s sort of impossible for Dave to get fired, or really even reprimanded for anything he does ever.
Which, luckily for you, means that he’s constantly breaking protocol to make you more comfortable. Even the number of stays you’ve had in the med bay so far would’ve been unbearable without Dave blasting his music and sneaking you candy.
“Alright, Harley,” Dave says, scribbling something on your chart. “In my capacity as Assistartition, I declare you officially down from helmstatus, may you long serve the empress, la-di-dah, you know the drill, I’m gonna go get Maryam now.”
He puts your chart down at your bedside and gets up to leave.
“Dave, did you scribble Hella Jeff on my chart while I was out of it? Oh my god you ass--”
you cut yourself off to dodge and start giggling when Dave throws his pen at you.
He tells you “You don’t understand true art, Harley,” as he walks away.
You throw the pen at his back and he stumbles and jumps when it hits him.
You wait for Maryam.
The thing about Kanaya Maryam is that she is perfect. You don’t mean this as an opinion. No, it’s an objective fact. Her clothes are always carefully considered and styled. Her voice is even and civil. Her posture is careful and upright. Her face is ambiguously pleased. Kanaya Maryam has taken every outward sign of being a sentient, mistake-making being and squashed it.
You hate her for it.
(And of course, it doesn’t help that Rose dumped you for her at the beginning of training. Nevermind that it hadn’t been working for a while and nevermind your friendship now, it’s still annoying.)
Now, you know all about troll romance. Being surrounded almost exclusively by trolls since the age of thirteen does this to a girl. You are very aware that wanting to kiss her until she loses her composure falls under the category of “hate crush”.
You have made the solid decision, following a time honored tradition of ignoring problems, to aggressively pretend this is not the case until the feeling goes away.
So far, this has been hugely unsuccesful.
“Helmshuman Harley,” Maryam greets you brightly.
“Head Medicutter Maryam,” you say back, perhaps a bit more curtly than necessary.
She consults you chart. You can tell when she gets to the page Dave had been doodling on, because she makes this face like she’s trying not to roll her eyes.
“It appears you’ve come down from helmstatus neatly. Do you feel in full control of you faculties, responses, etc?”
“Dave wouldn’t have sent you over here if I wasn’t.”
Maryam looks over the top of the clipboard at you. You think she might be annoyed, but she’s way too polite to show anything like that on her face.
You smile at her.
“Of course,” she replies flatly. “I suppose you can be going, then.” She signs your chart, hands you a release slip, and leaves you alone to change out of your flightsuit.
You count this interaction as a success on the grounds that you almost got her to emote, and you didn’t end up yelling.
Well honestly, if it had ended with both of you yelling it would have been a resounding victory.
It’s early afternoon by the time you get out. Well, what you consider to be afternoon? It’s about a quarter of the way through what counts as a day on this ship. Currently, the ship is on Paran time-- days are roughly 30 hours long, so actually pretty close to Earth time. You haven’t had to split days into eight shifts rather than the usual four so that you could work shifts without crashing.
You stop by the mess to pick up some food and head back to the quarters you share with Roxy. Currently she’s on call for flight emergencies, so she’s sitting at her computer fiddling with some kind of program. As you walk in, she glances over her shoulder and sees you. She finishes the line of code she was writing and swivels her chair around.
“Hi, roomie!” she says brightly. “How’d your flight go?”
“It was really good,” you respond. “I didn’t crash or fuck up the spacial diagnostics or anything!”
Roxy laughs, warm and amused. “I still can’t believe you managed to short circuit the space-time calculator. That was one of the worst piloting errors I’ve seen. Well, aside from the obvious, I mean.” You know what she means-- she was on the board when Mituna had his accident. It was the worst ship shutdown the fleet had seen in sweeps. When you got on board the Mauratania you were both nervous and excited to be working with his brother--or hatchmate, whatever. Mituna is, after all, something of a hero. You talked to him one time, in the room when Sollux had him up on the video feed. He cussed you out and then said he liked you hair.
“And you heard about how Sollux fucked up the locking mechanisms last week. I’m surprised Eridan didn’t take stronger action toward correcting that.”
“Yeah,” you reply. “But if Eridan actually took strong action for fuck ups and violations you’d be in pretty deep shit yourself.”
“That’s true! I’m hardly law abiding,” she says as she winks at you.
“Where’d the fun be in that?” you reply jokingly. You look at the clock and yawn. “Well, I’m going to catch some sleep. See you after your shift! Oh, and if you want some of this grub pizza you’re free to take a piece.”
She nods and you see her pull out some headphones before you turn around to change into pajamas and then climb into your bed.
You dream about the angry troll again. He wears grey, but something about him feels red to you. Maybe it’s just because you associate red with anger? This time he appears with the fishtroll again. She’s pretty, but extremely annoying, and looks like a younger and nicer version of the Condesce and her heir. The dream keeps switching between being underwater and on a spaceship. Your ship, it feels like. They’re arguing about something, but you can’t catch the thread of it. You hear names you know. Lieutenant Makara and Captain Eridan have frequent mentions, and you always wonder why it’s them you dream about when you have friends so much more interesting than you superior officers.
The dream shifts into one where you’re a robot for some reason and pumpkins keep appearing.
You wake to yelling in the hallway. It’s early evening, according to your clock, and Roxy is gone. Her computer is still on and unlocked, which is very strange for Roxy. She usually guards her electronics so carefully you’d think she was plotting government takeover.
The yelling escalates, sounds frantic, so you climb out of bed and approach the door to look out.
Across the hall, Researcher Serket is arguing with Aradia.
This, in itself, is nothing new. The argument, however, seems to be a new one. Usually it’s some variant of Vriska wanting Aradia to do something, Aradia refusing, Vriska pulling rank, Aradia pointing out Vriska doesn’t follow rank for shit (everyone on ship knows Vriska has somehow wrangled Equius into working for her, despite that he’s technically of higher station), Vriska saying maybe she’ll start, Aradia telling her she’ll go to Equius then, and at some point Eridan shows up and tries to auspitize and both girls tell him they’d sooner kill each other than get in a quadrant with him.
But right now, Aradia is saying, rather more desperately than you’ve heard her speak before,
“You have to let me go to the Pilot’s room. Sollux needs me, I’m his moirail--”
“I need you on the bridge! I don’t see what you’re worked up about, Roxy is the helmperson on call and she’s already there. And I don’t give a shit about your personal relationships! Especially the ones that are against fraternization policy, I mean damn.”
You step out into the hallway more completely and they both turn to look at you.
“Jade!” says Vriska, delighted. She likes you, insofar as you can tell only because John likes you and she likes John. For your part, you think she’s a manipulative butt.
“Jade, tell Aradia it’s silly for her to go to the Pilot’s Room when Roxy has it under control. I need her on the bridge to talk to Strider about the breach so we can get a handle on the situation.”
Dave’s brother is commander of security forces on board, officially under Equius Zahhak. In practice, it’s more like he works for Vriska. Equius just kind of lets Vriska run everything on ship and mostly concerns himself with PR and politics.
“Situation?” you ask. “And why can’t I do that, now that I’m up?”
Vriska seems caught between wanting to get her way and taking the more expedient option.
“Fine,” she says, finally, ignoring your first question. “But don’t think I’ll forget this insubordination, Medigo.”
Aradia shoots you a grateful look before she takes off toward the Pilot’s Room.
You go back into your room to pull a sweatshirt and jeans on over your pajamas. Then you follow Vriska to the bridge.
She prattles about how much she wishes Aradia were dead, mostly, and you can’t get anything out of her regarding the “situation”.
You get to the bridge to find Dirk Strider standing with his arms behind his back, looking pensively out a portal like the pompous dweeb he is.
Despite having a flat affect, Dirk is decidedly unlike Kanaya. For one thing, you can see right through his goofy better-than-you act. The only person on the ship worse at pretending to be cool is Dave.
“Report?” he asks without turning around.
“Medigo is a bitch who won’t follow orders. I got Jade instead,” Vriska says. “Now I have actually important things to be doing, so /excuse me/.” With that, she stalks out of the room. You look back to Dirk.
“She wouldn’t tell me what’s going on. What’s going on?” you ask him.
“Didn’t you hear, Harley?”
“Hear what? I was asleep.”
He raises his eyebrows at you. “Jesus, Jade, there were alarms going for for-fucking-ever. Don’t tell me you seriously slept through that and the seven unnecessary announcements and re-announcements Eridan made.”
You pause. You think maybe at some point there was a weird consistent shriek in your dream, but you certainly didn’t wake up.
“I seriously slept through that,” you inform him.
“Fuck,” he says. “Well, something is wrong with the security system. I was hoping you could tell me what was up. Doors aren’t locking, a few airlocks have opened for no identifiable reason, Sollux is freaking the fuck out saying he’s not doing it. Ampora has declared a state of emergency. God knows he panics about everything, but it looks like something is actually going on.”
“Didn’t Sollux fuck up the locking systems last week?”
“Yeah. But he’s saying this isn’t him and is panicking about breaches or something. Did Aradia go to the Pilot’s room?”
“She did,” you confirm.
“That’s probably good, maybe she can calm him down and get some answers out of him. Well, what do you think could cause a security breach like this, assuming it isn’t Sollux?”
“An outside enemy seems unlikely,” you start, “seeing as Alternia’s pilot-uplink system has yet to be successfully hacked into from the outside.” Part of the reason it’s so hard to get into the system is that every helmsperson has a unique style. There’s no official training, just guidelines, and then you basically make it up as you go. “I’d guess a bug in the software, maybe on Sollux’s side. Mental states can cause conflicting signals without the pilot necessarily being aware of it.”
“You seen any problems with Sollux?” he asks you.
“He’s actually pretty stable recently, as far as I can tell.” you say. Sollux has manic and depressive episodes. He tends to do a little better when he has a project to distract him, but you aren’t actually sure he’s been working on anything. He’s been even more reclusive than usual the past couple weeks.
“Short of getting Sollux out of the helm and Roxy in, what can be done to fix it?”
“Assuming it’s Sollux’s fault? A simple manual override for the specific parameter would work fine!”
“Right,” he says in that way of his that implies he totally already knew what you just told him, but wanted you to say it anyway for some mysterious reason. Irony, probably.
“Why was Vriska getting Aradia instead of you just going to her, anyway?” It really didn’t make much sense. Vriska ranked above him and it would have been much faster for him to go to see Aradia himself.
He just shrugs at you.
“Thanks, Dirk. Very informative.” He finally looks at you and his mouth twitches, his almost-smile. “I’m going back to my quarters.”
“See you, Harley.”
Back in your room, you finally pick up your communicator (shit, you can’t believe you left your room without one--). There’s a backlog of missed messages, mostly from Dave.
-- turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering gardenGnostic [GG] --
TG: hey jade
TG: jade
TG: jade
TG: harley
TG: are you asleep
TG: why are you always asleep when shit goes down
TG: fuck for real though did you not hear the sirens. wake the fuck up
TG: JADE
TG: “but dave typing in all caps doesn’t actually make your words louder! ;)” yeah well shut the fuck up
TG: look at this. im literally pretending to talk to you. this is pathetic
TG: its an emergency look at your goddamn communicator
TG: jade
TG: jade
TG: youd sleep through anything wouldnt you
TG: i could say anything and you would just ignore me
TG: all like jade jade its the fucking apocalypse. youd roll over and go back to sleep
GG: hi dave!
TG: oh fuck there you are
TG: what woke you
TG: did a fucking mariachi band show up in your room or what
GG: actually aradia and vriska got in a very heated argument right outside my door :(
TG: that woke you but the alarm didnt
GG: i guess!!
GG: anyway you said its an emergency whats up
TG: oh fuck right
TG: well there are these fucking trolls who are like science experiments or maybe captives or both or something
TG: and eridan the douchenozzle attacked the fishy girl i guess
so she and her shouty friend came to the med bay
TG: shes bleeding fucking everywhere
TG: her blood is super bright its so weird
TG: her friend wont quit yelling
TG: and then eridan came by and was all ‘gimme back my science experiments’ or whatever
TG: and kanaya was like HELL NO and got out her chainsaw
TG: now theyre in a deathmatch or something
TG: i mean maybe its romantic i dont get this shit
GG: what the hell are you talking about dave???
TG: look i cant really explain get here asap. just follow the sound of eridans douchey yelling
GG: right okay! but cant u just put a sword through him if he fucks with kanaya too much? god knows no one on the ship would argue
TG: im kind of otherwise occupied right now
GG: ???
TG: JUST GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE HARLEY
GG: fine im omw!!!!
-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG]--
You do not ask Dave how, if he’s so “occupied”, he has time to send you this many messages.
Shoving your communicator in your pocket, you take off running to the med bay two floors down. You don’t pass anyone in the hallways.
You get to the medbay, and the ringing silence concerns you more than a racket would have. Then you hear the roar of a chainsaw from the main office.
At the far end of the room, in the entrance to a hallway, Dave is keeping one hand on an injured troll’s stomach and has his communicator in the other. The troll is-- holy shit, that blood it’s fuschia. It’s certainly a brighter color than one you’ve seen. Gotta be royalty. The fishtroll looks deeply familiar but is ultimately unplaceable. There’s another troll behind Dave, too shadowed to see.
Kanaya stands, chainsaw ready in front of her, between the hallway and Captain Ampora. His back is to you. He’s saying,
“This is fucking ridiculous, Maryam, and you know it. I’m giving you direct orders to stand down.”
Kanaya meets your eyes over Eridan’s shoulder before her gaze snaps back to him.
“You are threatening trolls who are now in my care. Not to mention their secret presence on ship is against several medical laws. It is my duty, as head doctor, to serve and protect--”
meanwhile Eridan is shouting over her, “you already told me this shit, Maryam, what the fuck are you--”
but Kanaya continues right over him, “and it sounds like they have been kept as illegal prisoners for a great deal of time--”
You look at Dave.
When he notices you watching him, he puts down his communicator and moves his sunglasses to the top of his head. His eyes flick to the troll he’s got a hand on, then to Eridan and back.
That’s enough for you, but you didn’t grab a gun from your room (not to mention it’s a shoddy government issue you don’t care for anyway). You didn’t really think Dave was serious about how bad the situation was. He is, after all, given to exaggeration.
So, in lieu of a weapon, you do the next best thing. Be a distraction. You take your communicator out of your pocket, aim it at the back of your captain’s head, and throw it as hard as you can while yelling,
“Hey, you!! Ampora!! Desperate fish fucker, I should say!”
As far as insults, not your best, but it works. Eridan whirls around and only now you see the pistol in his hand. Seeing Kanaya’s armed stance and the other troll’s injury you guessed, but it’s nice to have it confirmed. Well, it’s not so nice to have a gun pointed at you.
“Harley,” Eridan snarls, but that’s as far as he gets. Never let it be said a troll will fight fair; they fight to win. Kanaya is no exception. She takes a step forward and slashes down with her chainsaw. You see Eridan’s shocked expression as he goes down. He fires a shot, but it goes wide over your shoulder. As he hits the ground he twists back to Kanaya, and she isn’t so lucky as you. He gets her in the stomach before you’ve managed to step over him and onto his wrist, forcing his to release the gun.
Eridan grunts and curls up. Kanaya stumbles back but doesn’t fall, and you step the rest of the way over Eridan and pick up the gun. You retreat toward Kanaya, keeping the gun aimed at Eridan. A violet stain is spreading on to the ground. He looks put out, but mostly just in pain.
“Maryam,” you say without looking back at her.
“Yes,” she says. “We should get to the escape pods.”
You keep backing up and when you reach Kanaya, you offer her an arm, which she takes and leans on heavily. The two of you make it to the hallway entrance, where Dave has one arm under the fishtroll. At his side is the small troll you saw before-- who looks angry and panicked and is almost certainly from your dream, horns so short they nearly disappear under unruly hair. You stare.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” the troll snaps, but you don’t get a chance to answer before you hear footsteps advancing from the main hall.
All four of you take off down the hallway.
The angry one is looking at a communicator.
“Sollux is being a useless shitstain and says he probably won’t make it. Fuck, what are we gonna do about a pilot?”
“Jade’s a pilot,” Dave says.
The troll looks confused.
“Uh, hi!” you say. “And who’re you?”
“Karkat,” apparently-Karkat says at the same time Dave says “I told you, he’s a fucking science experiment.”
Karkat grunts, “Fuck off, Strider,” and then says “Feferi, I get that you’re dying or whatever but say hi,” to the fishtroll.
That one looks up at you and says “A pleasure.” It’s with a weird inflection--yeah, there’s the sarcasm, but it sounded like “shore” instead of “sure”.
Dave chooses this moment to stumble and he and the troll almost fall before Karkat catches them.
“I know you’re incompetent but god, don’t drop her!” shouts Karkat.
“Keep it down, shouty!” Dave hisses back.
“Fuck,” says Feferi, pained.
Kanaya’s been unusually quiet and her grip has gotten harden enough to hurt.
You walk faster.
You forgot your communicator where it fell under Eridan. Fuck it.
You’re nearing the pods when everything bad happens at once, as it tends to.
There’s shouting in the direction you came from, the only voice loud enough to identify being Eridan’s. As you glance behind you, Kanaya’s steps falter.
Her chainsaw clatters loudly to the ground and she nearly falls herself, but ends up leaning on the wall with you pulled against her by your arm.
“Maryam!” you yelp, but her eyes and closed and she’s sliding down. Jade blood has soaked into her red skirt, turning it an ugly brown. “Kanaya,” you try, panicked. She doesn’t answer. Her fingers loosen on your arm and you scramble to ease her the rest of the way to the floor.
The other three are looking back at you and the shouting behind you is getting louder.
“We’re fucking fucked,” says Karkat, which really sums up the situation.
You look at Kanaya and back to the three of them.
“Well? Go!” you say.
“Jade--” Dave says.
“Like all of us getting caught is a better option!” you snap.
Dave stares at you and something shifts in his eyes. He adjust his arm under Feferi and then says, “Jade, we don’t have a pilot.”
“Do any of you have any psychic ability at all?” you ask.
Feferi looks up. “It’s not strong.”
“Are her wounds fatal?” you ask Dave. Ideally you wouldn’t be saying this in front of the injured party, but there’s hardly time for niceties.
“No,” says Dave, and he’s about to elaborate but that’s all you need.
“Good enough,” you say over him. “You’ll be fine a day without a pilot. Use it to rest, Feferi. The academy pretty much just drops us head first into piloting anyway and we figure it out on our own. The dangerous part is coming out of it and Dave knows procedure. Now go.”
Dave hesitates. He left his shades up and you can see how scared he is.
“We--” you re-evaluate quickly when he looks down at Kanaya, “I’ll be fine.”
You’re lying. You both know that even just you won’t be fine if you’re caught. Alternia frowns on unsuccessful coups and you know damn well Eridan will have you culled.
Then Karkat hisses, “Let’s leave, you shit!” and Dave nods and turns away. They hurry down the hallway away from you.
Getting Kanaya back on her feet is no easy task, seeing as she’s so much heavier than you: trolls are significantly denser than humans.
She’s apparently semi-conscious, because she gets a hand against the wall and helps even though she still doesn’t respond to you.
She’s unsteady, but if you take as much of her weight as you can, you can move forward slowly.
Very slowly. You won’t make it to the pods at this rate.
You breathe out hard and concentrate on remembering the hallways.
Fourth level, starboard side-- you helped Tavros clean up down here one time after you escaped from the medbay with Sollux. He was suffering from a migraine and vitamin defincency but they wouldn’t let Aradia see him. Their moirallegience, despite being well known, is officially off the books because Pilot partnerships were so discouraged. Might lead to too much solidarity, you guess. If that’s the point, why are pilots roomed together---? Wow, not the time. Right, where were you.
Well Sollux threw up and Tavros said he wouldn’t rat you out if you helped clean.
There was a maintenance closet nearby here.
Since you’re looking for it, you catch the off color strip on the wall that denotes a hidden door (after all, maintenance closets are unseemly. According to Eridan, anyway).
You manage to half-drag Kanaya over to it. You shove the pistol you’re still holding in the back of your pants (after clicking on the safety. you are not shooting your booty off) to free up a hand. You have to press on the wall a few times to find the right spot, but you get the latch to pop out and fumble it open.
Inside, it’s dark and you can hear your own harsh breathing along with Kanaya’s shallow pants.
You wait for the voices outside to pass.
The voices draw closer.
“Isn’t there a storage closet around here?” one is saying. It sounds like Vriska.
“I believe there is, Researcher Serket!”
You glance at Kanaya, but in the dark you can’t tell if she’s awake or not.
You shift her behind you and use your free hand to pull out the pistol and aim it at the door.
Someone is fumbling at the latch.
Light streams in as the door slides open.
Terezi Pyrope stands sillhouetted against the bright lights outside. You’ve always liked Terezi. You know she’s a good friend of Dave’s. You think about shooting her.
The gun’s aim dips from her head down her chest.
She pauses.
She beams right at you as she says, “Well, Vriska, I certainly don’t see anyone!” and closes the door.
You really don’t know what just happened.
Outside, Vriska is saying, “You don’t see anything /ever/.”
“Figure of speech! Don’t be so literal,” and you note that technically, she’s not lying.
Footsteps move away outside.
After what you deem to be an appropriate amount of time, you shift your attention to opening the door. The damn thing isn’t really meant to be opened from the inside, which seems like a gross lack of oversight to you.
You to manage to fiddle it open eventually, and you and Kanaya tumble into the (thankfully) empty hallway.
Kanaya slouches against the door frame heavily.
“Come on,” you say, helping her up again. She blinks at you, but shuffles forward when you move.
It’s painfully slow, but you make it to the emergency hangar without further mishap.
The hangar is, obviously, guarded, but it’s just Dirk. He raises his eyebrows at you but steps aside to let you past.
“Whoops, must have dozed off for a moment,” he says as he lets you by.
You smile at him and get into a pod.
Of course Dirk wasn’t the only security measure. They’ve disabled the autopilot in the emergency pod. They clearly don’t think you’re desperate enough to go without one.
Well.
In the pod, you get Kanaya to sit up against the wall and take down the first aid from the wall.
You know how to treat bullet wounds as well as any rifle enthusiast, but there’s only so much you can do with limited first aid.
You clean the wound best you can and wrap compression bandages around her middle.
It looks pretty bad, but you don’t have much of a concept of what’s fatal to a troll. It varies by hemotype, too, you think. Healing time and that stuff.
So you ask Kanaya.
“How bad is it?”
She grunts-- the least ladylike sound you’ve ever heard her make-- and her eyes flicker.
She looks down at herself.
“I don’t know,” she says at last.
“Will you-- will you live?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” she repeats.
You construct her a pile made out of every soft thing you can find in the pod, then help her move on to it. You feel like you should comfort her some how but hardly want to come off as flirtatious.
You sit beside her in silence, your foot touching her leg, until she says,
“We’ve done all we can. I need food and liquids and rest, and then we wait and see.”
You nod, prepare her a couple of dehydrated food packs that were stored in the emergency pod, and. Water. You don’t have any.
You poke your head out of the pod door to find Dirk standing right outside, obviously checking if you’ve left.
“Fuck, get out of here already. Serket will come check in with me soon,” he says.
“I’m trying,” you say back. “But we need water.”
He walks over to a backpack against the wall and pulls out a water bottle, which he hands to you.
“I’m on watch all night,” he explains when you look at it questioningly.
“Dirk--thanks,” you say.
He nods. “Human solidarity and all that,” he says wryly. He pauses, then, in a moment of odd sincerity, “Harley. If you find him, you’ll look after Dave.”
He says it flatly, like it’s a fact and not a question.
“Yeah,” you say, “Yeah, Dirk, of course I will.”
He nods and says, out of nowhere, “Irony.”
“What?” you ask him.
He shrugs.
You leave it at that and get back in the pod.
With Kanaya as comfortable as you can make her, you get yourself set up in the helm. It’s really not made for you to connect yourself, but you manage.
The feeling of being the pod is much smaller than you’re used to, and you have to pause to adjust to dimensions before setting to work. Paths to route, internets to hack, all that.
The pod buzzes to life and leaves the hangar.
You become aware of a steady and growing pulse at the back of your consciousness. It’s a dull throb that, with some concentration, you pinpoint as originating for your physical body. Oh. Right. That’s sure a thing you need to take care of. After looking at the time and determining that yes, you have been jacked in more than 24 hours, you wonder why Maryam didn’t bring you out of it.
Well, you would of fought her on it anyway-- there are still things to be done, even now, but they can be put off 7 or 8 hours while you eat and nap. You’ve got the barebones of a new autopilot program that should hold up at least long enough for you to do that without requiring your attention again.
You try to remember the emergency auto-shut down procedure but you seem to recall that step 2 was “alert ship’s crew immediately” and step 3 was “power down the consul and wait for assistance”.
You’d check the internet for, what did Sollux call them? Subversive autohelm zines. But you don’t have internet. It requires a password you haven’t figured out yet.
You think of the procedure again.
Step 1 was “remain calm”.
Ok, right. Step 2. You get every alert the computers have to flare up and sing for you, a cacophony of chirping and alarms. Maryam does not respond.
After a while it becomes evident she’s not going to be any help. You assume she’s passed out or can’t stand up or is just leaving you to take care of it.
Oh. Well, next plan then.
You don’t actually have another plan.
There are many dangers to self-shut down. You risk brain damage, severe burns, equipment damage, and just in general fucking everything up beyond all recognition.
It occurs to you that despite recent strides in Helmsperson rights, the empire really does not give shit about your well being.
Through the panic you feel a tight snap of anger-- for putting you and your friends in this position without proper training and with no choice in the matter. Or, if you had a choice, it didn’t matter, because you were thirteen years old and had been told your entire life what an /honor/ it is to be a helmsperson, to be selected, to be capable of it.
You’ve known for a while that these procedures are bullshit in the same way the talk-down dialogue is bullshit. They’re made up as a handy guide for you by someone who has never been a pilot. Someone who hasn’t even talked to pilots.
They don’t serve as an instruction manual or training. They encourage you to feel useless and dysfunctional if you can’t figure things out on your own.
You’re not going to figure this out on your own. You try to remember illicit conversations with fellow pilots-- anything that may have a clue of how you can get out of this.
You think of when Sollux told you about the autohelm zines. It was a crew wide party after some victory where Ampora was too sloshed to keep the rest of you in line while the other officers simply didn’t give a shit.
You and the other pilots had grabbed some bottles and headed back to your quarters. Flopped out across you and Roxy’s bed, you discussed things you were not supposed to talk about.
Sollux talked eagerly about autohelm techniques. He and Aradia had been working on uncovering documents about it from previous pilots, but references were hard to come by and often in code. He whispered the way the code worked to you and forwarded you a screen cap of the old web page.
It was convoluted and mostly about pumpkin farming, with snatches of references to equipment no one would actually need to farm pumpkins.
A lot of what it said confirmed Sollux and Aradia’s ideas. The empire was keeping pilots from communicating to ensure they do not become self sufficient. But you had all the tools you needed to function on your own.
You think for a long time. You have never been encouraged to put ideas together into new ideas, but one is forming: dual body/helm awareness, using your own body as a second crew member. Duality was said to be a malfunction of the system, but it was Sollux’s favorite feeling in the world and he would seek it out.
Let’s see-- concentrate hard on your body. Focus on minutae. What do the insides of your eyelids look like? How does your mouth taste? Can you hear your own heartbeat?
You focus hard on the pain your body is in and listen as your heart rate picks up in response to you mind’s presence and worry.
You can feel, and your fingers twitch. You reach behind yourself, clumsy and slow, to deactivate the system.
The pain intensifies and for a moment you are too in your body, you can’t execute take down procedures from the helm side, but you take a few deep breaths and slip back into the pod’s network.
It’s sort of like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. It takes a few tries before you can run the correct program and tug on your neural port at the same moment.
You get it though.
The port slides out of the back of your spine and you fall into your body. The dull ache is a full fledged migraine and you stumble over to where Maryam appears to be asleep in a little pile of cushions.
After drinking some water and blinking hard to try to push away the headache (only partially successful), you reach out and shake her shoulder.
“Maryam,” you say. You assume that earlier she was not able to stand to help you detach. You damn well hope your alarms bothered her.
She doesn’t respond and her head flops to the side.
“...Kanaya,” you try again, but you already know it’s pretty useless. Now that you look at her closely you can see she has that particular stillness of a dead thing.
Well. Fuck.
You were just beginning to suspect she wasn’t as obnoxious as you thought she was.
You’d usually be panicking at this point, but you won’t let yourself.
You push the panic away and put a cushion over her face. It’s the best you can do right now.
You check the external helm settings and double check the course is set and alarms will sound if anything changes. You lower the lights in the cabin.
Then you pull a couple cushions to the other side of the small pod and curl up to at least stop thinking, even if you can’t sleep.
You must have fallen asleep, because you wake up.
Light is illuminating the backs of your eyelids, and you wonder if you forgot to close your blinds.
Then you remember, you are in space, you have been in space for quite a long time now.
You take a moment to collect your thoughts-- the fight with Eridan, escape pod with a route set to the nearest inhabited planet, only companion and the person who presumably had some kind of plan dead--before you open your eyes.
You take that last bit back. She appears to be undead.
Kanaya, who’s standing across the pod ripping pillows apart while glowing, since that is evidently a thing she does now, looks at you and says,
“Oh. Sorry to wake you.”
You sit up and examine your hands. Five fingers on each, dirty nails, old rings. You twist one, an old habit, and it turns just right.
You guess you aren’t dreaming, then.
“You were dead,” you state simply.
Kanaya nods. “It would appear that way, yes.”
You look at her expectantly for a long moment.
“You’re glowing,” you say when she doesn’t appear to be forthcoming with any more details.
“Yes,” she says. “If we keep the cabin lights off, it will save power.”
There’s a pause as you digest this.
You are on a ship with a glowing undead troll who thinks you should use her as a lamp.
You can’t stop yourself from giggling, and when she looks so surprised and confused at the noise you emit you full out laugh, head against your knees as you choke on air.
Kanaya bends down next to you and is smiling gently when you manage to stop.
You hug her. She hugs back.
You question her further about her condition. She seems to think she’s a rainbow drinker, but isn’t really sure how that applies to real life or how she ended up like this. She doesn’t know much else, but she says if she had to guess she’d blame the experiments.
You’ve heard snatches of rumors about what happened with all the trolls on board the Mauratania before the human crew was assigned. During training, before anyone of your age group was in their final positions, you were all assigned to shadow existent crews.
Pretty much all the trolls applied to work on the same ship as their older hatchmates.
Your understanding of the situation is that Vriska ended up working in the labs under Gamzee’s creepy brother Kurloz. They got all caught up in some weird biomodification stuff, you guess.
“They started trying to get volunteers for their experiments,” Kanaya tells you. “Especially among the younger group, because we were considered more disposable. When no one complied willingly, the laboratories got the heir apparent involved. They were able to convince her that their research was more important than our lives. Anyone of the trainees Teal or below was subject to experimentation. We didn’t have any choice. The entire thing was a fiasco with few discernible benefits.”
“I heard you all almost died?” you ask.
“Some of us nearly did,” she says. “Aradia particularly. It’s how the rest of our crew came across our various disabilities. Terezi and Tavros had the most permanent reactions. Aradia was honestly never quite the same. At the time I was considered very lucky, since I managed to get through the experiments with only minor repercussions. I’d say this is more positive than anything that happened to the others.
Of course, Mituna caught wind of what was going on. Before they could get to his brother or expand the experiments to the older lowbloods, he completely destroyed the labs. I assume you know the rest of that story.
After that, the older crew fell apart. They were dismissed from the Mauratania crew and separated. We ended up with control of the ship.”
You know this kind of stuff is fairly standard for troll social interactions, but god. You and your friends had your problems, but you didn’t try to kill each other. Or do bizarre science experiments on each other.
More than ever you understand the trolls’ weariness of Vriska. You feel vindicated in not liking her.
“I always thought Vriska was a creep,” you tell Kanaya.
She smiles with little humor.
“I wish I’d been as good of a judge of character as you,” she says.
You smile sincerely and say, “I’m an excellent judge of character. I’ve always liked you, for example!”
Kanaya smiles for real and replies, perhaps more fondly than she meant, “You liar.”
“Wait, what were you doing to those pillows?”
“Well I can’t keep wearing this blood stained monstrosity.”
“What’s that got to do with pillows?”
“Do you see any other fabric around here?”
“Don’t you know there are extra clothes stocked on emergency pods?”
“....No, I did not.”
She does not think the standard issue tracksuit is nearly as fashionable as you do.
You both start trying to figure out the internet password so you can maybe actually contact someone.
“Do you think it’s a fleetwide password or a ship specific one?” she asks you as you fiddle on a consul.
“Probably a pod specific one, possibly even implemented at the same time the autopilot was shut down.”
“Who would have assigned it?” she continues.
“Uh, Dirk, I guess. He’s pretty good with programs and was at the hangar.”
She nods like this is good news. “Would he have had direct orders as to what the password should be?”
You think about this for a long moment.
“I don’t think Vriska would have given him a specific one,” you say.
“When you saw him at the hangar, did he say anything to you?”
“Uh, just some stuff about how he’d say he fell asleep, and later something about human solidarity,” you recall.
“Do you think he’d make a password specifically to keep you out?” she asks then.
You think about this for a while, too. You’ve known Dirk since you enrolled at academy, since he’s always been close to Dave. You’ve never known him very well, but you’ve been good friends with Dave a long time. You think about the last thing Dirk said to you.
“Oh,” you say.
-- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] --
GG: dave?
TG: oh jade thank fuck
TG: we were starting to think you didnt make it out of there\
GG: we kind of didnt
TG: what
GG: kanaya died, sort of? but she’s fine now
TG: ….what
GG: nevermind. just tell me there’s a plan
TG: ......ok
TG: yeah feferi says were headed to middle of nowhere sector 5
GG: @.@ youve gotta be more specific than that dave
TG: its literally the only planet out there in assfuck nowhere
GG: fine ill look it up! jeez
GG: its called detroit?
GG: who names a planet that
TG: feferi says its the condesces least favorite earth city
GG: how does she even know that??
TG: uh
GG: you know what, forget it
GG: well see you there
GG: <3 !!!!
-- gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG] --