Work Text:
At night, the torches in front of PandaLabs sent flickering shadows over the gardens, lighting the velvety pink tops of the belladonna blossoms and the swaying fronds of the mandrake leaves. There was a zombie under the sakura trees, underlit by the purple glow of the twilight forest portal. It hadn't noticed Nano yet and was staggering aimlessly through the flowers. She watched it, her rocket launcher balanced on her knees. The metal of the barrel was still warm.
The marble stairs she was sitting on vibrated faintly from the machines running downstairs. Every so often they would stutter to a stop as Lalna turned off the power to work on his rewiring project. He seemed content to leave her alone for now, after she'd demanded he stay away until she could confirm he wasn't an evil testificate-torturing psychopath.
She was still working on a way to confirm that.
She wanted to believe Lalna wasn't evil. He was the nicest person she'd ever met. Ok, maybe he'd killed their cat (twice), but he'd worked hard to save those testificates from the prison. He might have put a nuke under Rythian's castle, but only because Rythian was a revenge-obsessed loony. His first reaction on finding a new creature might be to cut it open and see what was inside, but he was just as unnerved as Nano when they accidentally slaughtered all of those innocent dwarves. He might have locked her in her castle for a hundred days, but when she was feeling charitable she could admit that he hadn't pushed her into the flux himself. And he always told her everything, even the parts that didn't make him look so good.
Unless he only told her the parts he knew she'd find out about. He didn't sleep in the bedroom most nights. She'd always assumed he slept in the lab downstairs, and once or twice she'd found him curled up behind the computer using his lab coat as a pillow, sound asleep. But what if some of that time he was missing was spent at the secret lab? How would she know?
The zombie had trampled the flowers around the portal and was now tracing the edge of the garden fence, its clothes catching on the rough wood. It groaned quietly to itself. Nano got to her feet and hefted the rocket launcher on to her shoulder.
Did it matter whether Lalna had done it? If she went back through her previous list of his exploits, she could probably find something good he’d done to balance it out. He was her teacher and her friend, and he honestly cared for her. He talked her down from her more violent urges and had given her the power to do so many things she wouldn’t have been able to do even a year ago. He was her mentor, and if he was sometimes did bad things, well, so did she. She wasn’t one to judge.
Through the eyepiece, the red crosshairs turned blue, locking on to the zombie. She pulled the trigger and felt the hard kick of the launcher against her shoulder, forcing her a step backward. The rocket arced over the gardens and then the zombie, the north end of the garden, and the sakura tree were engulfed in a bright yellow fireball that ballooned outward. The explosion was so loud that it hurt, and Nano ducked as broken glass from the upstairs windows rained down on her.
She went down on one knee, rubbing at her ears. The fireball dissipated into the sky, leaving a cheerfully raging fire behind. Sound came back under a high tinny ringing, and she started laughing as she caught her breath.
“What the fuck just happened?” Lalna burst out the door onto the steps next to her, his hands fisted in his lab coat, staring at the blazing sakura tree and the remains of the twilight portal. His goggles had been hastily shoved up on his head, sending his hair into more of a mess than usual.
“There was a zombie,” Nano explained between giggles.
“I told you not to shoot rockets on our property!” Lalna turned to stare down at her, his face hilariously dumbfounded.
“We can make another stupid portal,” she said, using the rocket launcher as a cane to help herself get back up to her feet. “I had one rocket left and it was just too tempting. We don’t even use that garden anymore.”
“Yeah, but.” He rubbed at his eyes, pushing his goggles up even further. “Those rockets are a pain in the ass to—” He stopped. Nano waited, watching Lalna’s expression slowly shift from exasperation to unease. “One rocket left? You had nine.”
“You have no right to complain about what I do on my private time. Not anymore.”
Lalna let his hands drop to his sides in defeat. “Was it Sjin or Hat Films?”
She grinned. “Hat Films. I got rid of their dumb sign. And most of the rest of their base.”
“Were they home?”
“I didn’t check.”
Lalna took in a deep breath, his shoulders rising, and then let it out in a gusty sigh. “Right.” He pulled his goggles down over his eyes again. “We probably have a few hours until they come for us. Come on. We’re going to need a shitload of rockets.”
He turned back toward the door of PandaLabs. Nano hugged her rocket launcher to her chest, smiling, and followed.