Chapter Text
Part one
Stranded
Trevor groaned and pressed a hand to his aching temple without opening his eyes. It was entirely too damn bright; usually Sofia was more considerate than that, even if she hated his drinking issues.
Sometimes, he was able to drink and drink and the hangover gods would let him win. And then there were days like this one, where everything hurt, and he must've fallen asleep in a chair because his neck had one hell of a crick in it, and-
Wait, why was it so bright? It was almost like natural daylight, which... the room lighting on the ship didn't have those settings. There was the Evil LEDs From Hell, the tamer, adjustable florescent lighting that was the usual setting, the sunlamps which kept people from suffering that particular lack...
He didn't have a sunlamp in the cabin he shared with Fia.
And now that he was paying attention, the air smelled vaguely of smoke and ozone, and... salt?
Trevor opened his eyes and winced, looking around slow and bleary; why in the hell was he in a lifepod? What the fuck had happened?
And where the hell was Sofia?
He had to hit the button on the arm of the chair a couple of times before it would unlock the safety harness, and Trevor didn't really stand so much as slide out of the chair. He put his hand to his head again and tried to think; how much had he drunk last night, and was it four or fives times more alcohol than normal. He had been getting better about that; Sofia hated it when he got blackout drunk, and he had to admit that while it numbed the pain—gods he missed Anna so much still, ten years gone and no clue what had happened to the Degasi, to her—he didn't like Sofia's upset or disappointed expressions.
Especially when he deserved them.
The lifepod was actually dim, and he looked over towards the wall, spotting the reason why after a couple of attempts; a panel had popped off—and hadn't he been telling Riley they needed to give those things a serious maintenance check?!—and some wires had frayed through. From the way they were spitting sparks, and the leftover taste of extinguisher foam, they had probably started a fire.
Thank god for Fia; his drunk ass would have died, probably, assuming he'd even made it to the lifepod on his own.
Which still begged the question of what the hell had happened. Pummeling his memory dredged up the sound of the alarm, of explosions as the ship shook, and Sofia all but dragging him around the dimly lit corridors to the lifepods, and then... well, basically nothing.
His head was clearing more and more, and after a few moments he decided to move towards the emergency storage. Food sounded like a terrible idea—whatever they'd hit, it felt and sounded like water now that he was paying attention, and he was definitely not enjoying it—but water would help get ride of the pounding in his skull.
And then he just had to wait for Sofia to get back.
Sofia clambered up the side of the lifepod, dropped the carry bag in, then herself, and breathed a sigh of relief before swooping down on Trevor and giving him a hearty kiss. His own relief came through in his response, and he wrapped around her, clearly not caring even slightly that she was soaking wet.
“...can you not do that to me?” he asked when she pushed back. “I mean... hell, Fia...”
“I didn't want to wait,” she replied, admittedly sheepish. “Sorry. I should have thought...”
“...well. You're back. What the fuck happened?”
“I honestly don't know,” Sofia admitted, letting herself settle into Trevor's arms when he showed no signs of wanting to let her up. “One minute I was trying to get you to the cabin so you could sleep the booze off, and the next everything went to hell. Alarms were sounding, people were running...”
Sofia sighed a little, raking a hand through her coppery hair to get it out of her face.
“We're pretty near to the ship, but we can't get closer,” she continued. “There's reactor damage and the radiation is leaking into the water...”
“It'll get to use in time, right?”
“I don't know. There seems to be something in the water keeping it from spreading rapidly, at least, but...” she shook her head. “I'm not a nuclear physicist.”
“Only because you didn't have the time.”
The groaning tease made her smile a little; Trevor wasn't wrong, at least.
“Where did we hit, do you know?”
“I remember something about getting prepared to slingshot around 4546B, so I'm guessing that's the planet,” she said, shifting to get a little more comfortable. “I don't have many useful blueprints on my PDA, but the fabricator works, so we should be able to make some things to make this less... dramatic, I suppose?”
“I don't think being stranded on an unknown world can be less dramatic.”
Well, his sarcastic sense of humor was intact. She'd take it.
Trevor eyed the water suspiciously. Until he'd gone to the Apollo trasn-gov and met the Tevish family, his only experiences with water had been less than fruitful He knew how to not drown, the very basics, but he'd never actually taken Mr. or Dr. Tevish up on their offers of swimming lessons.
(Honestly, he'd been a little unnerved by how quickly they'd taken to him, but he had to admit that his adopted family was a lot better than the distant genetic relatives he'd gotten the first time. Anna being the only exception.)
It looked pretty, he couldn't lie. The water was clear enough for him to see the bottom, not to mention all the fish swimming around, and Sofia had pretty plainly gotten into, and out of, it without an issue. But something about the water made him uncomfortable.
“Come on, you big baby,” Sofia huffed, treading water next to the pod. “I need your help with this!”
Trevor grimaced a little, and slid down the side, flailing a bit as he hit the water. She grabbed his wrist and pulled it to the rungs of the ladder, which he held tight for a moment as he spluttered and coughed.
“It's okay,” and her voice was gentler now. “Watch what I do and copy it. You don't have to be good at swimming, Trevor, you're strong enough that your form isn't going to be all that much of an issue. But you need to trust me, okay?”
Trevor did trust Sofia. Hell, after a year on the ship, he was pretty damn sure he loved her, he just hadn't said it yet. He just felt rather stupid, flailing around in the water like this.
“I should've taken them up on lessons,” he grumbled.
Sofia chuckled a little, and exaggerated her movements.
“This is treading water,” she said. “If you get too tired, tipping your head back helps you stay afloat. There's lost of different swimming strokes, but for now we'll use the butterfly stroke, which is this.”
She demonstrated, swimming back and forth while he watched the way her arms cut through the water, how she kicked with her legs. He wasn't entirely sure he could mimic her in the slightest—she was entirely too damn graceful, while he was a big lump of human on his best day—but she needed the help, and damned if he wouldn't do his best to try and provide it.
It still took him about three hours and a lot more flailing than swimming before he started feeling like he might have a handle on anything. Getting under the water was a trick in and of itself, and oh, he didn't like it in the least, but there really wasn't another option; they needed things to make a repair tool so that they could fix their lifepod.
He was glad when Sofia held up the last of what she thought they needed and they were able to go back to the lifepod. After all of that, he needed a long nap.
Sofia glanced over and shook her head with a fond smile; Trevor was strong, she knew, but there was a big difference between that and the stamina to push yourself through the water for ages on end. She was going to have to prioritize a seaglide next, probably, just to make sure he could keep up with her without a fight.
Though really, seaglides would help both of them.
It made her curious though; why were seaglides part of the fabrication roster? They were made for water only, and for a crew meant to bring a phasegate into play, that didn't make too much sense.
After a moment she pushed the thought away; anyone who could have answered that was either dead, or somewhere on the planet, and the only way she'd find them is if she could get the secondary lifepod systems—primarily the radio, and why was the radio a secondary system on a lifepod??—online.
She put the gathered pieces onto the fabricator, opened up her PDA, and hit the button for a repair tool.
Trevor slumped a little against the wall, admittedly feeling the slightest bit cranky. They'd gotten several radio responses, several distress signals since Sofia had fixed their lifepod, but every time they tried to find one, no one was there. Most lifepods they found had holes in them,flooded compartments, PDAs, and no people.
He was admittedly starting to get a little bit discouraged. He wasn't entirely sure how Sofia wasn't.
He glanced up as she slid down the ladder, and felt the tightness around his heart ease a little. At least she was staying close, so he wouldn't have to worry about her, wouldn't have to be afraid of losing her the way he'd lost Anna...
And at least she didn't bother with a platitude. She just put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed, her expression sad and understanding. She was the optimistic one here, and he could tell that her energy was flagging. She didn't even look at the flashing light on the radio.
Not a good sign.
Trevor pulled her down and into a hug, and Sofia wrapped around him, pressing her forehead to his neck.
“What do we do?” she asked after several long minutes had passed.
“We survive,” Trevor said firmly. “And we keep checking the radio. Captain probably got out a distress signal, yanno? Someone's gonna get here, and I'll be damned if I die on a literal backwater planet.”
It made her giggle, which made him relax.
“You're right. And we have each other, which is a lot better than it could b-”
“Oi, any other survivors out there?! Fucking hell, someone answer!”
Trevor jerked a little; most of the lifepod signals they'd gotten were automated distress calls—and damnit, he should have pushed harder for a maintenance check on these piles of junk—but this was someone broadcasting.
This was someone alive.
Sofia stared in shock, and Trevor carefully moved her off his lap to get to the radio.
“This is Trevor Moore and Sofia Moretti in lifepod five,” he said, and was pleased with how calm his voice sounded. “Who's out there?”
“Oh thank fuck. Look, I'm an engineer, no way in hell can I die in this fucking place, you have to get me out of here!”
“...what's the location of your lifepod?” Trevor asked, “So we can-”
“How the fuck should I know?! Where the hell even are you anyways, do you know what the fuck happened?”
Trevor tried not to be insulted or annoyed; whoever this person was, they had probably gone a few days thinking they were a sole survivor. He knew first hand how much that could fuck with you, so he took a breath, and made himself relax.
“Okay mate, I'm gonna need you to calm down. Should be a locator switch on your lifepod display. You tap that, and we can come find you as soon as we have the supplies.”
“No, no, you come find me now goddamnit!”
“Can't do that without a location, or some way of knowing where you are,” and despite his best attempts, Trevor's temper was starting to fray. “Or supplies to make sure we can get there and back.”
“Why the fuck would you go back to wherever you are?!”
Trevor took a breath and counted to ten.
“Because all our stuff is here,” Sofia interrupted, annoyance clear in her tone. “Now, who are you, and why do you think you can make demands like this?!”
“I told you, I'm Scott Janaro, of the engineering team, damnit!”
“If you're an engineer, then you should know how to follow directions,” and Trevor admired the speed and sass in his lover's response. “Turn on the location ping for your pod, or take your chance.”
There was thirty second of silence, before the PDA chirped.
Lifepod signal uploaded to PDA.
Trevor leaned down and lightly kissed Sofia on the cheek for working a miracle. She smirked at him a little, clearly pleased with herself.
“Okay. We've got your location. We'll let you know when we can head out.”
Sofia stepped onto the floating island, pushing her facemask up as she looked around curiously. They'd found the remnants of Janaro's lifepod, or, well seen them, down below the island. But he'd reported in, which meant somewhere in this place was a habitat with a working radio.
Not that he had any manners. What made an engineer more important than a terraforming surveyor, or a cargo worker? Really he should be grateful anyone else had survived at all. Because so far, it was looking like they might be the only ones.
Trevor pulled his facemask off and set his seaglide down on the beach, looking around with a low whistle.
“Damn, why couldn't we have landed on paradise island instead of in the middle of the water?” he joked.
Sofia snorted a little, and pushed him gently.
“It doesn't look all that big. Should we split up to search for him?”
Trevor's hand was instantly around hers.
“Nope. No splitting up. We told him we'd be here, and if he's not here, that's a him problem, not an us problem,” Trevor said firmly. Then squinted up at the top of one of the rocky areas. “Though maybe if we get higher, we can figure out where the hell he might be...”
Sofia nodded and Trevor started up a barely-there path, fingers twining securely with hers as he did so. It made Sofia smile, even as it hurt a little; he'd told her some about how he'd lost his cousin, and she couldn't exactly blame him for having attachment issues after something like that...
The island was fascinating, and she couldn't help but slow down and look around, wanting to catalog everything. If only the battery in her scanner wasn't depleted...
“...Trevor?”
“Hm?”
“Who do you think came here first?”
He stopped and blinked down at her, confusion and curiosity in his eyes. Sofia ran her free hand through her hair, and sighed a little.
“The scanners keep coming up with information we shouldn't have if these were truly unknown creatures and plants,” she pointed out. “But we've got names, eating habits, even that weird entry on the Peepers who glitter, like that's supposed to be pertinent information somehow.”
“You think people've crashed here before,” he said after a moment, slowly resuming his walk.
“I don't have any better explanation. Do you?”
“...no,” and she could see it made him uncomfortable to admit it.
And then he stopped short again, and Sofia peered around him, then winced slightly.
The small, flat area was wild enough at first glance, but closer inspection revealed small cairns of stones.
“....grave markers,” Trevor said softly, and his grip tightened on her hand.
“But... there's not enough soil here to bury someone?”
“Depending on how long ago it was, they're probably dust and grit,” Trevor pointed out. Then frowned a little. “Or maybe Janaro did this?”
While only a few minutes of conversation didn't loan itself to knowing someone, Sofia was pretty sure this was much too sentimental for Janaro's demanding personality. He'd been half-hysterical, and definitely ranting, and she hadn't been all that impressed.
Curious now, she moved towards the little cairns, and crouched to see if there was anything else. The piles moved when she poked them, and she hastily reassembled one as Trevor snickered at her.
“I wanted to see if they were cemented somehow!” she huffed, blushing.
“Well, now you know. C'mon. We have an idiot to find, and these people, beings, whatever, probably earned their rest. We shouldn't bug em.”
Sofia blinked even as she moved back to Trevor's side.
“I never took you for a superstitious one,” she said as they moved back onto the path and wound a little higher up.
“I'm not. Not really. I just figure if there really is such a thing as a ghost, and we bug it by fucking with the marker, well, we've had a shitty time as it... is...”
Sofia stepped up beside Trevor, and stared down into the middle of the island, as stunned into silence as he was.
There in the middle, just barely peeking out of the water, was a moonpool.
“I can't stay by the fuckin radio all the time,” Janaro argued, glaring at them. “You said it was gonna take a few hours, so I figured I'd get some shit done!”
Trevor pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd only known the other man two minutes and he wanted to break his damn nose. And going by the tension in Sofia's shoulders, she was feeling similar.
There were enough exterior growbeds that he could kind of see Janaro's point, unfortunately. Some type of melon, and potatoes seemed the most prolific, but there were other plants that looked like they needed some harvesting, and the growbeds themselves looked like they needed a bit of tending to remove weeds.
The habitat situated in the middle of the beds looked weathered, but not worn; the exterior needed a new paint job, but the windows were in decent repair, and the hatch opened smoothly without any squealing or crunching noises that would indicate rust or junk on the hinges. It was too old to be something Janaro had made....
It was also making his hair stand a little on end; the graves were one thing, something he could ignore. But this? Had people lived here recently? And if they had, where the hell were they?
“All right, that's fine,” Trevor said, letting out a sigh. “I can see why you'd do that. Have you heard from anyone else?”
“No,” and the other man's response was sullen. “Pricks are probably all prepping to get off this hellhole...”
“If only,” Sofia huffed. “Everyone we've tried to find has turned up missing. Lifepods are sunk all over this place, and it's more likely that everyone's dead.”
“W-what...?”
That seemed to get through the man's self-centered attitude, though he had to admit he probably would have tried saying it a bit more gently. Janaro just stared at Sofia for a long moment while Trevor looked more closely at the habitat.
“No... no, we had a ton of people on board.”
“We did,” Sofia agreed, her tone gentling a little. “But we haven't found another intact lifepod, or people, since we started searching. And-”
Emergency. A quantum detonation has occurred in the Aurora's drive core. The reactor will reach a critical state in T minus 10. 9. 8.
“Shit...”
Sofia ducked into the habitat behind Trevor and Janaro, clinging tightly to her lover as the Aurora's explosion vibrated through the air. She heard the sound of her PDA pinging with a newly uploaded blueprint, but what was more important was the way Trevor was stock still, staring across the room.
Sofia looked around him curiously, and saw that the small room was mostly filled with lockers and various storage materials. Ther was a thin layer of dust, suggesting it hadn't been touched in a little bit, but not so much to suggest someone other than Janaro hadn't been there recently.
Two wall lockers had names on them, names that Sofia didn't recognize, but Trevor plainly did, because he gently shook her off and staggered a little as he went over to them. He pressed a hand to the door of one, obscuring the name, and made the softest, most heartbroken sound Sofia had ever heard him make.
And to be fair, she'd heard plenty after spending time with him when he was blackout drunk.
“...Trevor?”
It was rude to ignore Janaro, but he wasn't exactly being much help, so Sofia ignored him, and put her hand on Trevor's back.
“She was here,” he whispered.
Sofia looked at the locker door.
A. Torres
Trevor couldn't open the door to the locker. He didn't want to know if she'd left anything there, didn't want to hear words over a decade gone that were more apologies or maybe even recriminations. It had been hard enough the first time, when her messages had finally hit his inbox after months of silence, and he had gone to Apollo, to meet the Tevish family. They'd welcomed him, suffered with him, helped him get the certifications he needed to work cargo loaders, to make a life for himself, but they couldn't get their son back.
He couldn't get his cousin back.
He sat on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the weather-and-waterworn moonpool, and tried to get himself under control. He wasn't going to be any use to Sofia if he cracked to pieces like this, and he needed to be useful. Needed to do something that wasn't dancing around Janaro's irritating demands that they 'figure something out' as if that wasn't what they'd been trying to do since hitting waterworld.
Taking a deep breath, Trevor watched as the plants around him began to gently glow, knowing how much Anna would have enjoyed it, and barely twitched at the sound of footsteps moving up the dirt and rock. They were too light to be Scott, which meant they belonged to Sofia, and that was usually fine, but he wasn't sure he could manage to be around her when he was like this.
She sat next to him, and he glanced over at her briefly before looking back down at the moonpool.
“....what if they're still here?”
Trevor jolted, and turned properly to stare at her. Sofia had that calculating look on her face, one that he knew meant she was turning her formidable intelligence on a mystery, and wasn't sure if he wanted to go along with it, or cut it off. Could he dare to hope when it had been so long?
“Look at it logically,” she continued, and motioned to the moonpool. “That's running off solar panels, which need to be maintained. So does the moonpool itself. The habitat is weatherworn, but if it had been abandoned for ten years, I'd expect it to look a lot worse, and let's be real, Janaro's not the cleaning type.”
Trevor snorted a little, but found himself nodding in agreement.
“The growbeds are in the same state as the hab; they need to have some maintenance done, but they're not fused to the ground, and they're mostly well-tended, which means someone has to come around regularly enough to make sure the weeds don't evertake the actual edible plants. And Janaro admitted that he had to mess with the radio settings before he picked up our lifepod ping.”
Trevor let out a shaky breath, and closed his eyes.
“So you think there's... at least one person out there?” he asked.
“I wouldn't be surprised if there was two,” Sofia said promptly.
“....Fia, then why aren't they up here?”
She was quiet, but only for a moment.
“I don't know why they went somewhere else, but the habitat feels more like... like it's a hotel room,” she said. “A place to stay for the night, but not a place to live in. If I had to guess, whoever our survivors are, they come up to harvest, and maintain, and then go back to where they live at the moment.”
“...or maybe they recently died, and we're just finding what's left,” Trevor replied.
He wanted to believe Sofia, he really did. But hope and failur, then hope, then more failure, hadn't exactly loaned itself to him being optimistic about much. Bad enough that he had small anxiety attacks whenever she was out of sight, he wasn't sure he could handle the idea of his cousin being alive, tantalizing him, and then find out she'd died not long before they'd hit.
“Think about that too, Fia,” he said quietly as his girlfriend gaped at him, hurt in her blue eyes. “The Aurora hit hard. And that explosion wasn't quiet or gentle; if there were other survivors, why haven't they come out of where they're hiding to find us?”
“I.... I don't know....”
“I'd love to be of your mindset,” he said softly, reaching over and taking her hand. “I really would. But I just... I can't. And honestly, we need to figure out what we can do for us, not if people are... are here.”
He'd joined the Aurora, knowing where they were going, but not disclosing that he knew. Hoping that the man the Apollo trans-gov had sent would be able to find evidence of their survival, or at least proof of their deaths. Closure.
But now they'd been marooned on the planet, and optimism wasn't going to keep them alive. They needed to figure out survival first.
“...All right. Then. What do you propose we do?”
Trevor took in a breath, then looked towards the burning aft of the Aurora.
“Well, we can't let that leak radiation into the world,” he said firmly. “If the explosion opened a way into the ship, we need to get in there and deal with the reactors. Might be able to salvage some parts for prawn suits and seamoths too, which'll extend our range for getting things. We need an MVB for the moths and suit, and we'll probably need a base of our own that's not our lifepod...”
Sofia nodded her understanding, and Trevor managed a half-smile. It would be on his mind, thanks to Sofia bringing it up, but he could ignore the idea. He could.
He would.
They had more important things to focus on.
It took five days to repair and then clear the Aurora of everything portable; Most of the food and water got stored in their lifepod at Sofia's insistence, since Janaro had plenty of both on the Floating Island, while they tried to split the remainder of everything not nailed down between their own slowly growing seabase, and Janaro's.
“It's not good for him to remain isolated,” Sofia said with a small grimace as she packed the duffle bag with some of the extra food and water, and a few batteries for the habitat builder.
“I mean, he's the one who whined about getting back into the water full of things that want to eat us,” Trevor pointed out. “I don't think he cares that much as long as he gets to boss someone around...”
Sofia sighed, but had to admit that Trevor probably wasn't wrong. Janaro hadn't really warmed to being a third survivor, and every time they checked in with him he was curt and rude, trying to give them orders as though he knew what was going on. And when they didn't check in, he got even more demanding and rude when they finally did reach him, or managed to get a message to the radio instead of a live contact.
“Well, I suppose if he takes care of that base and makes sure everything is growing okay, we shouldn't have to worry too much about food when our nutrient blocks run out.”
“Optimist,” Trevor teased gently, pressing a kiss to her cheek.
“Well, someone has to be. Come on, we want to get there before it gets dark again!”
Trevor was usually pretty unflappable. It was a gift to be able to control his reactions, even if it had taken him about five years after meeting the Tevish's to learn that skill. But he had to admit, the scene before him was shaking his calm more than a little.
They'd arrived on the floating island a little after the sun had hit zenith, Sofia taking her little seamoth down and under with the idea that she'd park in the moonpool, and walk up to meet him. He'd waiting on the beach, wanting a few moments along in the sun and the silence, and had heard...
Fighting?
He listened more closely, then almost jumped out of his skin as Sofia's seamother surfaced, and the pulled herself out from the top, eyes wide.
“There's someone else here! There's another seamoth in the moonpool!”
Trevor dropped his bag of supplies next to the seaglide he'd used and turns to scale the path, Sofia hot on his heels. When they reached the level ground where the small habitat lay, they were just in time to watch Janaro get knocked on his ass by a roundhouse kick from...
Trevor's brain short-circuited. Auburn hair, copper skin, a flash of green eyes...
“I said,” Her voice, her voice, oh god was it really her? “don't tell me what I can and can't take from my own garden, verdamnt! We planted these long before you were here, and you have no claim to what's mine.”
The voice, the hair... but the wording was wrong. Anna hadn't ever been able to stand up for herself like this. Anna had hated confrontation, hated getting involved in any sort of physical fight.
Janaro looked up, wheezing and clutching at his ribs, then spotted them, and smirked. The woman whirled, a knife in one hand, then stopped short, staring.
“....Trevor?”
“Oh my God....”
Trevor sat down, hard. He wasn't sure if he was really seeing this. Maybe he'd been eaten by the terrifying Leviathan-class creature near the Aurora and this was a dying hallucination?
The woman was lovely, objectively speaking; more than that, she looked healthy, something he and Anna had always struggled with, never having enough food for either of them to get the required calories. Auburn hair was much tamer than it had once been, tied back in a tail that was separated into coily puffs. The smattering of freckles on coppery skin, the small scar on one cheek from where he'd fucked up and almost gotten them both killed...
“...Anna?”
“Trevor!”
The knife was abandoned and the woman—Anna, his sweet, soft, quiet cousin—shot across the clearing to tackle him, knocking him flat onto his back in delight. She felt so wrong to the memories of her, but there was no mistaking her recognition of him, the sound of her voice as she broke into delighted Spanish that he struggled to follow as she hugged the breath out of him.
She was solid.
She was real.
She was alive.
He closed his arms around her, and decided that just this once, he could let his relief show.
Sofia watched as Janaro's smug look faded into confusion and irritation, as Anna continued to speak Spanish at Trevor who didn't seem to be processing even the tiniest bit, and felt some smug satisfaction. She had been right. It was nice to be right.
Trevor had moved from the stunned shock to tears of relief, and while Anna hadn't stopped talking, she'd softened her tone, smoothing Trevor's salt-encrusted hair as she soothed him. It took a few minutes before Trevor could get himself back into a sitting position, and Sofia dropped down next to him in a tailor's seat, questions already bubbling in her mind.
Anna slanted her a look, and unwound herself from Trevor. Or. Well, she tried, but the best she could do was sit sideways on his lap, something Sofia decided didn't bother her after a moment of thought. Given that he'd spent the past decade thinking she was dead, and all the deep-rooted trauma that had come from that, him being clingy made sense.
“...Trevor?”
“Ah... sorry,” and Trevor's voice was husky, cracking a little as he tried to get himself back together. “Anna, this is my girlfriend, Sofia. Fia this is... this is Anna, my long-lost cousin.”
Sofia beamed and stuck out her hand, which Anna took after a moment, and gave a firm, brief shake. Anna studied her with... curiosity? Yes, that's what it seemed like. And then a tiny, shy smile blossomed, and Sofia had to squeal a little internally at how cute it made her.
“Would someone explain just what the fuck is going on here?!” Janaro demanded. “Like, legitimately, what the actual fuck?!”
“Can it not be you?” Anna shot back, “You're noisy.”
Sofia started giggling. She couldn't help it, everything Trevor had told her about his cousin seemed to be factually incorrect, and just watching his eyes go wide as Anna shot sass at Janaro was almost as funny as the sass itself.
Janaro did not seem inclined to agree, if the red face was anything to go by, and he tried to stand up tall, only to wince, and hunch a little.
“Oh. I must've cracked a few ribs. Sorry. It's been so long since I've had to deal with people who haven't acclimatized.”
She sounded apologetic, but she didn't exactly look it. And honestly, if what she'd been saying to Janaro as they came up had any basis in fact, she was pretty much in the right.
“How about this,” Sofia said quickly, before Janaro could open his mouth and get himself into further trouble. “We'll tell you what happened to us, if you can give us an abridged version of what happened to you.”
Anna looked at Sofia again, and then smiled that tiny, shy smile again.
“I like you,” Anna proclaimed. “Let's go inside; the weather's going to turn in the next hour, and I should let Abuela y mi amor know that I'm going to be delayed.”
“...you're love?” Trevor asked, even as he loosened his grip on Anna.
“Si. It'll be part of the abridged version, but... well, admittedly, there's something more important that I should tell you first.”
Sofia couldn't help but be intrigued, and bounced to her feet, following Anna into the habitat