Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Avocato still thinks about killing Gary sometimes.

And not in the harmless 'anything to shut him up' way, though he certainly feels that surge often, but in a decisively more homicidal manner. 

There's no malice to it. Not really. Once upon a time there may have been (and isn't that funny, how Avocato is already thinking of their relationship in long tenses, as though they hadn't just met) but it was for only a brief period, namely the very first hour he'd been "prisoner" aboard the Galaxy One. That particular hatred was spawn of raw survival instinct, highly objective in form and trained on broadly everything: the ship itself, the warden, the failed mission. 

Then.

Then, well, Gary. 

A wrecking ball of utter chaos, explosive happiness hallowed with madness and isolation. Unexpected. Of all the possible obstacles that Avocato had painstakingly mapped and taken into account, the primate was absolutely, laughably, not one of them. Avocato struggled to detach, to keep the idea of human trash impartial, impersonal, but for all his effort he could not stop the inexplicable transformation of "the warden" into...this.

Hour four of compulsory cards, he watched Gary practically foam at the mouth at another straight flush, giggling, and Avocato simply knew he could not hate the man.

(Dislike? Yes. In fact, with a burning passion. Hate?...Not quite. Or at least not enough to warrant a slow, painful death when he eventually got out of his bonds—and he would be getting out of them.)

Fast forward one disastrous adventure later, Gary is now sans a single organic arm while Avocato has gained all sorts of baggage.

Avocato likes Gary. He does. The novelty of their emotional pact remains excruciatingly fresh in Avocato's mind, eyes constantly drawn to his tingling hand as if by a magnet. He'd be inclined to believe it was the product of Gary's so-called supernatural Clasp Of Friends, if that wasn't stupid, but he knows it's due to the microvascular surgery he performed. The stench of open flesh, the cool of the gelled metal underneath his fingers, snap-crackle fury and loss raging past his lungs to prod some frail place deep in the dough of him, spongy and untempered by his past evils. All the while the ridiculous man lay there, injured, promising him that he would do anything he could to help save his son. Where just once, Avocato used his hands to heal instead of hurt.

So yes, Avocato more than likes Gary. But there's a teensy problem. 

He won't stop touching him. 

Contrary to belief, Avocato isn't averse to a friend. While not alone in physicality, he'd been alone in mind for years upon years of service, growing more cold blooded by the second, then alone in his self implemented red-hot anguish over his son, so it was...nice to have someone he did not have to pretend around. Someone he was sure wouldn't turn and stab him in the back if given the chance. Nonetheless, habits were hard to tame, and trained reflexes even harder to cull—specifically the reflexes that demanded he twist Gary's head off his skull each time he entered his space. 

Avocato had been respected in the Lord Commander's army, but above all, he had been feared. Anyone with a basic sense of self-preservation wouldn't dare to speak to the assassin out of line, much less touch him without invitation. 

Gary knew nothing of his past.

It would be easier if he could learn to expect his movements, and thus react accordingly, but Gary was also anything but predictable. He was a chemical experiment bubbling over, chock-full of outbursts and random spontaneity that knocked Avocato off course. Rapid bops to the nose, curious flicks of his ears in the hallway, excited hands grabbing his shoulder pads and pulling him along to show off something in the ship—it took a rather worrying amount of restraint to keep his claws unsheathed and out of the human's neck. Avocato had only survived this long in his line of work by hard-earned instinct constantly ready to incapacitate any sorry bugger that tried to get the one-up on him, and Gary was dangerously close to becoming that bugger. 

They needed to talk. 

"Gary," he speaks as he walks into the Bridge, loud enough to be heard over the buoyant ball of energy cooing. E-351—Mooncake, he reminds himself forcefully—is listening intently to a sixth retelling of their escapade, whirling above in a smooth figure eight that Gary observes with clear endearment. 

"What's up my man! My dude! My man-dude!"

Gary sounds a little off, but Avocato chooses to ignore it for the time being, venturing closer till he's at his side.

"I need to talk to you about something," he starts. Gary nods, eyes round and tired. Has he not slept? Avocato softens in sympathy, tentatively placing a hand on top of the glove already resting on the circular hub. "I-"

Only for Gary to flinch, drawing his hand back as if he'd scorched him.

"Woah there!" 

What.

Gary wrings his hands together, chuckling nervously as he puts a foot of space between them. His eye is twitching. "Don't just startle a guy like that with hot contact!"

What.

Something on Avocato's face must betray him, because Gary swallows, apprehensive. 

"You had something you wanted to-?"

"Gary." Avocato takes a deep breath. "What...just happened?"

Gary splutters in denial. Mooncake rises behind his head, as if ready to come to his friend's defense, but a scathing look silences them both. 

"Nothing?"

Avocato looks at him and looks at him. "Nothing."

"If you must know!" Gary finally relents. "I've been on this ship for kinda a while!"

He stops there, as if that explained anything. Avocato raises an expectant eyebrow. 

"And?"

"And! And," Gary tries to box his thoughts into something understandable, pausing, before quickly giving up, "you know when you don't eat for a long, long time?" He waits again for approval, and Avocato nods slowly. "Right, so you fantasize about gobbling up a ton of spicy goodness or salty goodness, or uh sweet 'n sour goodness for forever, yeah? Seconds and thirds and fourths. But when you finally get to eat, you can only handle a plate. Stomach shrinkage and all that. It's so much." His boisterous gesturing is growing in fever with his anxiety, chest heaving. "It's so much." 

Avocato can already feel his lungs tightening.

Times like this it becomes increasingly obvious that his partner has been dealt a bad hand, and his hackles rise, heart itching to crawl up out of his throat. Emotions directed to anyone besides his small little bundle of orange fur were unusual and confusing, a whole new experience that clouded his head with sickly fog and strained his thoughts into a discombobulated undercurrent. Weren't he and Gary just a pair? Where his life was a neverending hurricane of change, the other had been shackled to a hell of monotonous standstill, sensitive to even the smallest drop of rain. Splintered in different ways but touchstarved all the same. 

The prisoner of the Galaxy One was trying to convey that he sometimes needed cool-down time, or else he'd overload.

"Message received."

"What?" Gary whispers.

Avocato narrows his eyes, allowing his lips to widen into his familiar smirk. "I said I got it."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"Oh," Gary says, seemingly at a loss for words for the first time in his existence. He turns to consult Mooncake, who abruptly slacks open his mouth and blasts a gaping hole through his forehead. 

Not really of course, but that's what it feels like when Gary's head suddenly tilts off skelter, his muscles apparently signing off. Avocato doesn't hesitate to wrap his arms around his midriff as his knees buckle. 

"Sorry. Guess I'm more tired than I thought," Gary says, pressing a hand to the hard plane of his chest. The other spreads in the fur above his jugular. Avocato does not go rigid at the touch, Avocato does not shiver, and Avocato does not imagine plunging his thumbs into the soft give of the blonde's eyes, watching bulged sclera pop and splash. What Avocato does do is set him delicately back on his own feet. "Now what was it you wanted to talk about?" 

"Go lie down," Avocato says. Gary opens his mouth. "And no more stories. That goes for you too Mooncake, don't encourage him. If I have to hear about this Quinn chick one more time I will tear my ears off."

"Chookity-pah!" 

"Harsh, Avacato, harsh! "

The next morning, they're attacked by a fleet of heavy incinerators and subsequently eaten by a Temporal Worm. If Avocato sounds the least bit concerned over having to safeguard Mooncake, Gary doesn't mention it. And if Gary tugs Avocato's hand on their way out the ship to Yarno, well, Avocato would say he had more pressing things to worry about at the moment.

Chapter Text

He's quiet now. Fast asleep, his head dangling precariously off the edge of the booth and slowly dragging the rest of his body with its momentum. Avocato stares. Something about this, maybe the effortless innocence, maybe the way the human curls tightly into himself, uncharacteristically still, is captivating. 

Gary promptly begins to snore. 

"Healthy people trust," Avocato mutters, amused. His wrist flicks upwards to tighten his hold on the knife. Gary was many things—irritating, kind-hearted, headstrong, naive—but he was nowhere near healthy.

Quinn had been far too occupied to truly dissect those words, frantic from ice cold betrayal and clinging desperately to the tatters of her perfect control. Avocato didn't need to expound on his own plethora of issues. None of them were healthy.

"There Are Four Minutes Remaining Until Immediate Retrieval."

His ears twitch involuntarily. Otherwise, he chooses not to gift H.U.E. the benefit of a verbal response. Given the fact that every camera in the room was intensely trained on his furry ass, the disembodied intelligence should surely be able to see Avocato rolling his eyes. 

A can opener. He'd asked for a can opener.

The intrepid response had been, and quote, "there lay nothing in reach on the Galaxy One that prisoner Gary could use to potentially cause harm to his own being." 

Avocato did not want to unpack the insinuations behind that mess, so he did what he did best: he didn't ask questions.  It didn't matter much in the end anyway, as H.U.E. eventually unearthed a knife from some long hidden compartment—a knife, as if that was safer than a damn can opener—and graciously allowed him ten minutes.

Sighing, Avocato angles the jagged edge of the blade into the nook of the can top, easily popping it open.

"Relax," he says. "I'm done." 

Truthfully, he could have been done ten minutes ago. Testing the AI was intriguing, if not entertaining. 

"...Avocato?"

Ah. "Yes?"

Gary rises slowly at first, rolling hills of knees and elbows and warm muscles limp with lethargy before abrupt convulsion as he jerks awake, forehead glistening with sweat. Hiss past his teeth. His prosthetic creaks from where it's trapped beneath his ribcage, a terrible whining groan that climbs into his bones and sets every hair on Avocato's tail stiff. 

Gary blinks. The room is enveloped in simulated night, as is the rest of the vessel,  flushed dim and humming with the sound of living metal that often became forgotten background noise throughout the "day."  Avocato's eyes are well dilated to a ghoulish glow, two molten streetlights beaconing in the dim. Gary blinks.

"Still here," he breathes, a little too soft to have been meant to be heard, but entirely too loud to have been missed by feline ears. His lips part as his gaze drifts from the Ventrexian to his cybernetic hand, squirming fingers pushing up and outwards from underneath his crimson jumpsuit with as much finesse as one half-asleep. Discomfort settles in Avocato's stomach like microgravity untrained. 

Gary is so naked. 

Rapid-fire emotions blow across his face like dust clouds scattered by a roaring engine. He was frustratingly easy to read, and it was painful to watch the confusion splash into his manic eyes each and every time he caught sight of Avocato, as if he expected him to vanish into thin air. Gary fumbles, eager to scramble upright—

"Hey man, be-"

—and falls right on cue, smacking face-first into the ground. 

"-careful."

"Oops!" Gary grins, pulled tight like a puppet string. Any vulnerability has been wiped clean from his expression. "Got distracted by the sweet piece of metal you bestowed onto my body. Forget it's there sometimes. I feel like a power napping baby! H.U.E.! Is it morning?"

"Time Is A Construct That Is Meaningless This Far Out In Space, Gary. We Are Nowhere Close In Proximity To Any Particular Planet. I Have Told You This Many Times."

"Well I don't recall asking for sass H.U.E. What time is it, my majestic cat friend?"

"No idea," Avocato says.

"Crap."

The salmon sluggishly slides into the bowl, tepid grease shimmering against plastic. Avocato vaguely relates to the slight of the food, slothful laze supine in all its droopy eye wonder as Gary visibly perks up, bushy hair bouncing in the direction of the smell. 

Ironic. The blonde insisted on calling him a cat, when he himself was a hyperactive pup.

"What's uh, what's the grub?" 

"Wouldn't you like to know?"

Gary gasps dramatically, affronted. 

"Sorry," Avocato says, not sorry at all, "I'm having a bad morning." 

"Oh jeez, no problem bud. 'm real sorry yo-hey, hey, wait a minute, you said you didn't know what time it wa-"

"Ding. Ding. Ding. Time Is Up. There Are No Minutes Remaining." 

Avocato chucks the knife, ignoring Gary's scream as one of the S.A.M.E.S. crashes into the wall outside. 

"Sweet Grandor's glove! "

"Gary."

"OH. You are really not having a good day—oh god!—H.U.E.! The music! The frickin' calming music! Play it! Play th—"

"Gary." Avocato sets the bowl down before him with a loud clunk, tapping out. "Shut up and eat."

He shuts up. Avocato watches realization gradually birth itself, the creeping beginnings in his fisted hands, quivering, travelling up his body to unscrew the tightness coiling behind his cheeks and slacken his jaw. Disbelief. A nameless feeling synonymous to wartorn want want want, undulating affection rearing its ugly head and ready to assert its own foolish opinion. Gary clears his throat, and when he speaks, there's a husky warmth in his voice that has nothing to do with his grogginess. 

"You know, I would've been a-okay with the usual gruel."

(Oh my street meat! They've got street meat, Avocato!) 

"I doubt that."

Gary has long stopped listening, engrossed in his rambling. "Actually, speaking of that gruel, H.U.E. has treated me the same thing every day for the past five years, as, I'm guessing, a special captain's privilege and I, woah, I don't know if I should, you know, break that, it might hurt his feelings. Shatter him into tiny little H.U.E. pieces."

"Gary, I Do Not-"

"Shut up H.U.E.! I don't need your twisted negativity!!"

Gary blows air into his pressure-pinked cheeks, shoving a stuffed cracker into his mouth. His eyes immediately bulge out of his skull. "Is this chicken? Where did you even get this?" 

"I have my secrets," Avocato says stoically. The facade holds for nearly a whole second more before rapidly unravelling at the seams, Gary's wide open mouth of chewed mush sucker-punching the air right out him.

Avocato bares his fangs in a wide smile. "That-" he lets out a sharp bark of laughter, "That is disgusting."

Gary swallows dry. It must have hurt like hell, but Gary rebounds as Gary always does, absolutely glowing. The shine spills out of his skin like a thousand star-systems. Avocato looks away, averting his head lest he goes blind from the brilliance. 

Gary was a sun.

"Oh hey! Come in here, someone's having a—Mooncake is an award winning face hugger you'll enjoy this, trust me—having a bad day. Do your magic lil buddy! Just don't, careful with the—okay milk everywhere, uh, Avocato be chill man. Be chill—"

Chapter Text

"Open your mouth."

"Coming on a little strong there aren't we?"

Avocato smiles. His hand flicks upwards to firmly grip Gary's jaw, squeezing very very slowly until it clicked open. He dutifully disregards any screaming protests as he hooks his fingers past stretched lips and incisors to further wrench the mouth ajar, saliva dribbling out between his knuckles to nestle in the folds of gums.

It doesn't take long for a problem to present itself. Pitch black. Warping darkness: pinks and white locked up in steady shadow. Pointless, Avocato thinks, and releases his captive as suddenly as he had clutched him. "H.U.E." 

The A.I wordlessly brightens the lights, seemingly as fed up with the human as he. 

Groans fling themselves out of said provocateur like lard, blocky and fat. Gary full-blown shudders. "That was gross."

"For who?" Avocato says dryly, wiping off his hand on Gary's collar. "In case you forgot, this is entirely your fault." 

As if one case hadn't been enough. Gary was nowhere near an idiot no matter his strange insistence in acting as such, and so Avocato just could not understand why he would take, as Gary himself had tastefully put it, trippy acid, from strangers not once, but twice. Their situation this time was significantly different, however, as there was evident lack of any helpful bystanders willing to hand over anti-stimulant syringes. They had been overtly lucky that Gary had even emerged hale and whole beforehand from that utterly, painfully avoidable debacle—

He digresses. Avocato is familiar with the substance Gary has ingested this time. 

And all of its consequences.

"Curiousity will always triumph danger," Gary says sagely, entirely unaware of the murderous intent Avocato is holding back by a thread. "She's an unstoppable maiden, that one."

"You know what else is unstoppable? Death."

"Debatable." 

Gary must have some form of lizard brain in his skull because he backpedals quickly at the darkening of Avocato's features. "But probable!" He smiles, batting his eyelashes as he props himself up. "Diagnose me doc'."

With a sudden rush of apprehension, Avocato remembers why he hadn't revealed much in the first place.

"I already told you," Avocato begins nonchalantly, deciding the lights were absolutely bright enough now as he tilts Gary's head back anew. "I'm looking for a blue tooth." Gary opens his mouth. "Do not make that joke again." He closes it.

"Yes," he moans a second later, "but you didn't explain why. Or how. Don't even get me started on what."

"Oral ingestion of synthetic V8X. You asked this question when we flushed the majority of it out of your system." Gary winces, both at the memory of the forced regurgitation, and at the current fingers prodding once more at his jawline. Avocato cups his face fully, gently massaging his cheeks in short reprieve from his earlier roughness. "I am sure you remember that much, at least." He's not asking as much as he's warning, allowing his voice to drop into a velvety growl that has the man under him stiffening.

Gastrointestinal decontamination was messy business, and he should be immensely grateful it did not have to come to that, petulant attitudes aside. The Galaxy One was drastically unequipped with any solution of electrolytes needed to perform a mechanical washout, and any other attempts of...bowel irrigation would require them to land the ship. Not that it mattered. Gary was fine. He'd have shown the pressing symptoms of a man one foot in the grave much longer ago was he in any way severely blighted. If anything, the only real concern Avocato has is the possibility of Gary asking him why he has such extensive knowledge of the poison in the first place. That was something else entirely that he would not be talking about. "The...circumstances you're facing right now are harmless side effects."

Gary narrows his eyes. Avocato smirks.

"I have to say though, I prefer you blonde."

Gary rolls his eyes with all the confidence of a man well aware of himself, running a hand through his flamboyant shock of raven hair. In the light it shimmers almost purple. Alongside dry, flushed skin, Gary is an exhausted, jarring antonym to every previous image Avocato has swallowed of him.

It's hilarious.

"Oh you have no idea," Gary practically preens, leaping heel-first into another bout of theatrics. "Not my worst colour." 

At Avocato's obvious skepticism the Sun merely tips his shaggy head like a great dog, grinning. "Teenage rebellion, my friend."

There it was again. Fondness.

Not small but big in its hulking cheer, his fondness, prominent in its arms wrapped around his waist and knowing smile behind his heavy exhale. Swelling. The Sun wiggles his eyebrows and Avocato's fondness swallowed the sight greedily, veiled by the ever crumbling mask of disinterest. God had he really been without sensible interaction for so long? 

"Anyway, you didn't answer my question," Gary speaks. Avocato only inclines his head, rendered mute for the moment. Gary might as well have pinned him down by the throat. "What exactly is this blue tooth gonna do?" 

Signify whether or not they were screwed. The colouring was nothing but a physical show that exposure was too high-dose to come back from. Gary hadn't gone into muscular paralysis as of yet, and Avocato knew near clinically well what those seizures would look like, having administered V8X on others on...many occasions, so he was ninety-nine percent sure Gary was safe. Had been safe for the better part of the hour after the initial purge, especially with H.U.E.'s indifference to the whole dilemma. Nevertheless, there was still that one percent of uncertainty that he couldn't bring himself to shake. Asphyxiation was not a pretty thing.  

"If you'd stop distracting me and let me check," Avocato rotated his knuckles to tap at his lips, "then it would do nothing. Do you want to die, man?" He needed to get this over with. Gary's paranoia was starting to edge on him as well, and if that happened nothing was going to get accomplished. 

"Die?!"

Oh, for the love of—

"You didn't say anything about dying !"

"I did."

"Well, I thought you were joking dude! Clearly!"

"Why d'you think? Now stop talking." He doesn't ask this time when he opens Gary's mouth, leisurely avoiding the other's attempt to snatch his hand. "You're not going to die."

"I could!" His rage is muffled and near incomprehensible. "I could jump out of an airlock right now just to spite you!"

Avocato chooses the higher road: ignoring him.

Gary continues to sputter like a dying engine. Unnecessary. KVN's insane fantasy of being Gary's soulmate, H.U.E with his own emotional and mandated obligations to keep his prisoner intact, not to mention the literal weapon of mass planetary destruction napping in the room over—of everyone on the ship, Avocato might quite be the most unqualified to save Gary in that situation. Truthfully, he finds himself fascinated by the rows upon rows of dull molars he observes. 

"What happened?" Gary's voice is high and panicky. "Did you find something?" 

Avocato's acknowledging hum rumbles deep in his throat. 

"You did?!"

Avocato blinks. 

"No," he says calmly, unfazed by the terror on Gary's face. "You're good, baby."

Gary's head snaps back into place, hair huge, as if a cool wind had swept through the ship and set it to tossing. He looked huge as well, straightened and bristling all over. "Then what was it?"

"What was what?"

"What?"

"Hmm?"

Gary watches him with measured approval. Avocato almost smiles. Almost.

"Your teeth are blunt," Avocato says. "I got distracted."

Against all logic, Gary looks offended. "Yours aren't all that different."

Unamused, Avocato snarls, a flash of pronged teeth carved out across his face like lightning. 

Gary swallows.

"Ookay...maybe you have a nice set of pearly whites. Are you a Polgate or Prest kind of guy? Answer carefully."

"Gary."

"Avo-cat-o," his name is a singsong, syllables stretched wide like taffy as Gary peers at Avocato's mouth like he'd found the holy grail, looking but a few seconds away from attempting to shove his hand inside and losing it to the needle-points. 

Avocato turns and leaves the room.

The soft patter of feet behind proves he's been followed. Avocato groans. 

"You'd think you'd be tired of trying to kill yourself for the day. Seriously."

Gary says nothing as they walk to the bathroom. Nothing as Avocato washes his hands, nothing as he twists the resistant faucet closed and dries. When Avocato finally swivels around, Gary is comfortably leaned against the entrance, face blank but eyes alert and laughing. 

Avocato blushes under his fur.

"You reminded me of my son," Avocato grumbles, well-aware that Gary would not let it go until he heard the truth. Gary allows himself to be shouldered past, smoothly rocking back on his heels to stroll beside him.

"How so?" 

Avocato enters Gary's bedroom without much of a second thought, the muscles in his forearms taut as he stretches. He sits on the bed. Rests his elbows on his knees and leans forward, yawning. It is but a few steps but Gary cuts the length between them reverently, raising his gaze to the ceiling before capturing Avocato's quietly. 

He always got like this whenever Avocato mentioned his son. Sweet and solemn and ready to listen as if Avocato was about to reveal the secrets of the universe. Avocato runs a still-damp hand over his face in feigned agitation to shield his twitching lips. 

"When he was about three weeks," Avocato sighs, "his milk teeth started coming in." His eyes shutter, and

he is a decade and a half younger, melting. The floor smells of unforgiving summer, dust and heat and an acidic splash of bleach to mask the metallic stink from the last hired man that had tried to off him. Between the distinct hum of civilization outside the door and his constant exhaustion since his new...job, sleep nearly lulls him back to Zion, but his worries are heavier than his eyelids, and so he drags himself to the crib. "Kid bit and chewed at pretty much everything and anything in sight. Including me. Little devil." Half-cool railings by the north wall and gnawing mewls latched onto his thumb. Avocato couldn't hide the affection in his voice if he'd tried.

He dismisses the memory. "Uh, you're different, obviously, but the feeling was there."

Gary is silent.

Avocato glances up. Snorts.

"What?"

"Sorry man, your hair—"

Gary watches him with that same unreadable expression that drags something warm and fuzzy up his spine. His tail curls around his leg absently.

"Dunno how pint-sized he may be now but you gotta tell me that story again later. Preferably like, right in front of him, so I can watch him maul you." Gary is grinning from ear to ear. "Y'know, when we save him and all." 

He doesn't get much else out before pitching over suddenly from a hard punch to the ribs, a flurry of green whizzing round him, awoken from the commotion.

"Right," murmurs Avocato. Gary wasn't even aware of how easily he had said those words. Mooncake wobbled frantically like one of those tin toys from market, the kind that pushed out onto stone and tittered from side to side as Gary lifts his hands in a woah woah woah motion, attempting to explain his ebony crowned head through his laughter. "When we save him."

Avocato smiles softly, throat tight.

Hope.

Chapter Text

Her time machine implodes.

The very fabric of existence twists inside out, a flood of shrieking emptiness that brings him to his knees and riddles him with gooseflesh from head to toe. Little Cato wails in anguish, dry-heaving against the freezing floor. "I'm so alone."

Gary burns.