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Jonny isn’t sure what to think of his new crewmate.
She’s a bloody princess , for one- though, not anymore, if her readiness to up and ditch her home planet is any indicator. He doesn’t blame her, far from it. Getting out of New Texas was just about the best thing to ever happen to him, and she seems to feel the same about whatever went on on Cyberia.
The Doc is pleased as punch to have someone else around. Jonny’s been told that he can be.. grating , and Nastya’s calm but firm demeanor seems to have helped Carmilla out of whatever melancholy pit she’s been in. Doesn’t hurt that she’s willing to help with the long, long process of cleaning out the Aurora, too. Jonny’s even heard her talking to it as she works, making little jokes and observations, complimenting particularly hardy or interesting design structures, asking it questions, as though the literal hunk of metal she’s polishing will answer back.
But a new member, Jonny is learning, means one more new test subject for the Doc, which means less appointments for him. He’s not terribly bitter about it, really. He doesn’t miss getting various knitting-needle-sized syringes stuck into his heart as he spasms on the table, or being peeled open like an orange so she can watch how his muscles react to this sort of neurotoxin or that level of electric shock.
It’s just-
Carmilla never talks to him outside of their sessions. You and me, we’re separate from them. We’ve become something better, and that is something to be shared, and to be cherished. It’s what she’d said when he’d woken from that first surgery, doped up and burned and sweating bullets but still very, very, very much alive. Well, at least from Jonny’s perspective, there isn’t an awful lot of cherishing going on these days. Or sharing. Unless you count midnight breakdowns where she sobs quietly into his chest and he tries his best not to cry on her kimono.
And it’s okay, he gets it, social interaction is something she needs in microdoses. It doesn’t help matters that he’s grating and rash and ungrateful and a million other bloody things that have been spat back at him in return for cold and detached and monster . They always apologize to each other in the end, and they always mean it, but he knows that when the Doc needs her space, she really does need it.
So, Jonny keeps to himself. He’s practically a professional self-keeper, so much so that it makes pirating, murdering, and generally ruining slash ending the lives of as many sentient beings as possible seem like a side gig.
He’s doing his job and self-keeping along one of the lower levels of the Aurora when the elevator begins to shudder open. His last appointment was two days ago, and Carmilla had showed him the course she’s charting, hitting up three of the most populated nearby solar systems before entirely changing course. Her eyes had flashed excitedly as she’d said that, like it had some secret double meaning, and Jonny had grinned right back with gore-painted teeth before his eyes rolled back and he promptly fell dead on the table again.
He’s shaken out of his memories by the clunk of the elevator doors opening all the way, and braced against the wall, shaking, is Nastya, eyes dark and haunting behind her crooked glasses as she stares out at Jonny. Instinct tells him to back away, so naturally, he comes closer, looking her over with a macabre curiosity. Like mother, like son, he supposes.
“Christ, th’fuck happened to you?”
She lets out a humorless laugh, one pale hand tapping her forehead as she staggers forward, falling into Jonny, who catches her on instinct. He brushes away the hair clinging to her forehead, and a sickly shiver runs through him as he stares down the grisly dent in her skull, slowly oozing silver-blue blood in a way that would be fatal if left untreated for someone who healed more slowly than the two-now-three of them did.
“She hit me, for- for a test, and she k-kept hitting me, and I… I got sick of it, so-”
Nastya smiles a woozy half-smile at him as she pushes herself back upright, and Jonny watches with an odd concern simmering low in his mind as the flesh begins to slowly knit itself back together. This is the most casual he’s ever heard her, and it’s mildly horrific how her elegant, princessy sentences are turning into a twenty-car pileup of brain damage. He imagines something inside her skull- perhaps her blood, hardened into grasping tendrils- pushing stray bits of her skull back into place before sealing it shut again with a squelch , and another shudder of yikes strikes his spine at an unpleasant angle.
With hardly another thought, Jonny takes Nastya’s wrists and pulls her towards him, letting her support herself on his side as he slowly but surely moves them both down the hall, around the bend, chasing the white rabbit of need to be safe, need her to be safe .
---
He doesn’t end up finding Wonderland, surprise, surprise. No, what he finds is the storage bays, which could almost be considered better than any huge caterpillars high off their asses or bizarre chessboard metaphors.
Thinking about it that way, the storage bays are definitely better. Because the storage bays still have cargo, somehow. And where there’s large amounts of random shit that definitely belongs to someone else, Jonny thrives .
Nastya looks tired, mostly. He knows the feeling, the thud of an overworked or brand new mechanism through every fibre of your being, begging you to stop moving, stop beating, stop living. Her head’s healed well in the hour or so, though, and the new skin where the injury was is slightly swollen, still colored an unsettling greyish-teal.
One of the first crates Jonny tears open, using the claw hammer he’d found in some corner and stashed in his belt ever since, has cloth sacks of flour, and he tosses one of the cushier ones down to Nastya, laughing a little as she catches it with an unf .
“And what am I meant to do with this.”
Jonny waves his hand vaguely, lobbing another one down before jumping from the top of the crate he’s on to the closest one and getting to work prying it open.
“Your head’s still a little fucked, I assume. Y’can use that as a pillow, ‘n’ I’ll find us something to drink.”
He can practically see Nastya’s confused but agreeable head tilt, even as he deliberately looks away from her to make sure he’s not about to crush his fingers with the hammer. Sure, they’d fix themselves fast enough, but it’s quite an unpleasant situation, almost worse than getting shot in the head. He’s definitely not avoiding her.
“Won’t alcohol make it- oh, I don’t know, worse somehow?”
Nastya’s ‘w’s slip into ‘v’ territory, but she’s definitely talking like herself again, or what Jonny’s been able to infer is herself. He rolls his eyes as he finally wrenches the damned nail out, opening the crate with a resounding creeak . This one’s full of paper, and he stomps about on it, sending sheets flying and nearly falling on his face when a particularly wobbly stack decides to betray him.
“Is that your professional medical opinion, Dr. Rasputina?”
“Is that your professional prescription, Dr. d’Ville?”
He shoots her a sharp look over his shoulder as he rights himself, one that clearly says shut up and let me make it better, alright . Actually, he’s not sure if it’ll make it better for Nastya, but he’s sure it’ll do wonders for him and his dour mood, and what works for him is probably good enough for her. He’s a simple man with simple needs (or so he likes to tell himself), most of which are whiskey or something equivalently alcoholic.
The next few crates don’t yield much interesting; some ancient-looking guns of some kind, one of which Nastya takes and begins to methodically disassemble, a kind of tea neither of them have ever heard of but happily steal anyway, and about twenty different colors of paint.
“Is she… like that with you?”
Jonny shrugs, midway through pulling up another lid. He’s not good at talking- oh, he can improvise and joke and insult and plot but he can’t talk about things that are concerning- and he suspects, Nastya isn’t either, but the silence of the storage bay is stale at best, so-
“Yeah. Used to be a lot more, if we’re comparing. She won’t do it more since you ditched, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her nod, shoulders relaxing. He tosses a nail behind him, heaving the lid off, and “Thank fucking Christ, I was getting sick of looking through ancient crates.”
Admittedly, what he finds is rum, which isn't his thing, or Nastya’s, but it’s alcohol, so there’s something for it. It won’t taste like New Texas, that’s for sure, and Jonny should probably be a lot happier about that than he is right now.
He shakes his head, grabs a bottle in each hand and performs an utterly graceless descent that earns him a delicate eyebrow raise from Nastya.
New home. New mom. No dad. Nastya is also a development. This is better.
Still, his mouth manages to say for him-
“So... what was your first drink?”
Nastya squints in confusion as Jonny collapses onto the unoccupied flour sack, waving one of the bottles in her direction. It’s a bit of a non-sequitur, he’s now realizing, but she’s smart, she can figure it out. She takes the rum from Jonny, and he can hear her delicately screwing the cap off as he digs his teeth into his own cap and does his best to open it that way.
“... It must have been… шампанское , what is that called?”
“Champagne?”
That’s. Not quite what he was expecting. Nastya nods, though, and takes a quiet sip from her bottle, untucking her feet and shifting her weight forward so her chest is almost resting on her knees. He makes a vague noise that might be something like ‘go on’, was his mouth not full of bottle cap again.
Nastya is silent. Jonny glances over to her as he spits out the cap and takes a long drink of the rum. She’s staring at the floor beneath her feet, as though she can see the void of space outside through the metal. He feels a sympathetic frown tugging at the corner of his mouth. He’d recognize a classic memory-induced thousand-yard-stare anywhere, really, given how many times he’s probably done the same thing. He prods at her arm, just enough to earn a startled blink followed swiftly by a mildly offended poke in return. Her eyes focus, just slightly, and she begins to speak.
“There was a party being hosted. An ancient cultural celebration, though it did not matter to them. Or me. Everyone that had influence in Cyberia was going, that was the important thing. My-” she takes another sip of rum, looking faintly nauseous (though Jonny doubts it’s from the alcohol)- “parents were attending, of course, though my mother needed help to move around. She was kept in a coma, to stave off her illness, and her muscles had, uh.. wilted, while she slept.”
“Atrophied? Fuck, how long was she out for?”
“That time it was less than a year. The longest period was almost three. I cannot remember much of her not asleep, really.”
Nastya looks mildly miserable at the thought. Which is extremely fair, Jonny thinks, as he takes a swig from his bottle and watches her do the same. His fingers are beginning to feel a bit fuzzy at the edges, but it’s a good numb, drunk-numb, not Doc-injected-me-with-a-huge-fuckoff-thing-full-of-toxins-and-now-I-can’t-move numb.
“But we went as a happy family of three, regardless. My p- they started talking to a group of people, and- forgot about me? Left me?”
She sighs, and Jonny can imagine the scene with a twinge in his metal heart. A young Nastya- how old did you have to be to go to rich people parties in Cyberia? Twelve?- standing alone by the grand double doors of some awfully gaudy ball. People passing by, dancing, flirting, laughing, but never stopping to talk to the girl with sad eyes and scuffed shoes.
“In any case, I was alone, and someone had put down their glass without drinking much. I ended up sitting outside in my fancy dress, looking at the people and the stars and drinking my sad, stolen prize.” Nastya shakes her head, taking a drink. “They did not even notice enough to be angry at me. It was lonely, but it was life. It was home. You know?”
Jonny hates that he does. He settles for a sullen nod as a response, draining the last few drops from his depressingly small bottle. God , when did everything get so depressing ?
“Well, that was bloody sad. Let’s keep looking through these, shall we, m’lady?” He staggers upright, bends down to appraise Nastya’s former injury. Never let it be said that Jonny d’Ville is not considerate. It’s healed, save for a small nick in her eyebrow, so Jonny grabs both her hands and whirls her upright with a “whee-hee!”. She lets out a quiet shriek, and oh yeah, she was still holding the rum. He hears the glass shatter on the floor somewhere as he spins round and round, tugging Nastya along, like a planet in his orbit, a carousel of just the two of them, and he’s laughing and laughing like someone’s filled the clean spaceship air with morphine, he nearly chokes and-
Abruptly, Nastya pulls him into her chest, and he goes willingly, tripping over his feet as he tries to figure out how to stop his head from spiralling now that his body’s stopped. Through the fuzz, he can feel her chest heaving, and shit, is she crying?
But those sounds aren’t sobs, it’s not quite right, and that’s when he realizes Nastya is laughing , shoulders shaking as she giggles into Jonny’s hair, hands clutching his like a lifeline.
Jonny can’t remember if he’s ever made anyone laugh like that. It makes him smile, too, burying his face into Nastya’s shoulder, and they stand there and bask in the joy of being baselessly, blatantly happy together. He rocks the both of them back and forth, humming a shanty he heard in bars the last time they’d touched down. It turns into a half-assed, stumbling square dance, Jonny doing his best to lead while his head is still tucked down, and Nastya trying to follow a dance she doesn’t know, with her head also down, while fairly drunk and trying to avoid stepping on broken glass.
“You are a fucking idiot.”
Jonny wants to feel offended, but he can feel the gentle fondness in her tone down to his toes, like a warm bath. It reminds him of his mother’s blankets that she could never afford to give up to him.
But love doesn’t cost anything .
It’s a silly thing for him to think. The Doc loves him, and that cost him plenty. He’s still paying it off, really. His father had loved him, in his own distant way, and Jonny had loved him back, for a while. They both paid the price in bullets.
But it feels true, and you can take the boy out of New Texas, you can show him half the damn universe, you can rip out his heart and teach him how to kill an entire planet at the same time-
You can’t make Jonny d’Ville not trust his gut. And his gut is warm and full of rum, and his gut says this one could love you, and if we keep going like this, you could love her too.
Quieter, but still very much audible: “Thank you.”
“Yeah, rub it in, Nastya. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
Mumbled into the thick fabric of her coat: “Anytime.”
They sway together in the storage bay for a very long time.
And later, when they find a window, they talk. They talk about blood, and about close calls, and knives to throats and loaded guns. They talk about blood, and about traitors, and they talk about the prices they have had to pay. They talk about blood, and they talk about hearts, and throughout there is a gentle rhythm, made up of a steady ticking and the quiet, thrumming beat of liquid metal.
And later still, The Doctor finds them asleep at a viewport, and collects the empty bottles from around them, and smiles, a private smile, rare and sweet. It’s good to know her children will be getting along.