Work Text:
Hello, hope, it’s been a while
I thought I was damned to watch life through my hands
Now I’m not in the place I thought I’d be
Makes looking back a whole lot simpler
- radical face, “dead ends”
Dutch and Johnny haven’t been travelling together for long and things are still… strange. They’re just beginning to get used to moving in the space around each other, figuring out what shape their interactions with each other were going to take as they came. It felt, moment by moment, figuring out how the other was going to respond to something, like experimental chemistry. Like putting two chemicals together into a compound and seeing what the reaction would be - if it would explode, if it would repel, if it would bond, if it would be inert or lethal or curative or something as-yet nameless.
Dutch feels out of place in her own ship, since she took off in Lucy out and away from her old life. It’s like she’s trying to re-learn who she is. What she is. Which doesn’t make it any easier to figure out who and what Johnny is at the same time.
Things get a little tricky one day and Dutch catches a blade in a bad spot.
To be honest, she isn’t happy with herself about it. She knows she should’ve done better than that in that fight, dodged or ducked or caught the knife by the hilt before it made it anywhere near its destination. Dutch has gone off somehow. She’s slipped sideways, become so unfamiliar that she doesn’t recognize herself at all anymore. The person she knows herself to be, has always been as long as she can remember, would never have let this happen, and it’s terrifying and infuriating to think about. It makes Dutch’s hands curl into fists and her jaw ache with how hard she grits it.
The cut on the back of Dutch’s neck is deep. It’s not lethal, not by far, but it’s deep and it’s bleeding hard. She can feel it trickling over her skin, pooling in the valleys of her collarbone until it runs over onto her chest. Looking down, she grimaces. It’s a shame. She’d liked this shirt.
In addition to the unfortunate shirt ruining, the wound also hurts like hell and Dutch has been around the block enough times to know she’s going to start getting light-headed soon. Which means that she’s about to be in for an extremely irritating evening sitting on the counter in front of a mirror and craning over her own shoulder to see the wound and treat it from the worst possible angle. It’s going to be a pain in the ass and it’s going to hurt like an absolute bitch the whole time.
Which- it’s not like Dutch hasn’t done this before. She has, and that’s precisely why she knows how bad it’s going to suck. All of this is only on top of the worst feeling, which is knowing that it should never have gotten to this point in the first place.
The slight clattering sound by the doorway into the open space in the centre of the ship is what tells Dutch that Johnny’s there, and she rounds on him faster than she’d like to admit that she did. On one hand, the demonstration of her reflexes maintaining their edge is good, but the fact that she’d been startled enough to need them in her own ship is another thing entirely. It’s just another piece of evidence towards the way Dutch is warping into such an unrecognizable person. She crushes the spooked rabbiting of her heart in favour of calling forward the irritation she felt along with it, stoking the hard little coal of it until it burns a solid flame in her chest, letting it show in a glare on her face.
If Johnny's noticed the reaction - not a flinch, Dutch will not call it a flinch - he doesn’t say so. He leans his shoulder against the wall, keeping a distance that’s just far enough not to even begin to encroach on her space (at least not farther than his mere presence aboard Lucy in the first place encroaches more than she ever should’ve let anyone do) but still close enough not to be overly conspicuous.
“What do you want?” Dutch asks, snaps, eyes narrowed. The back of her neck stings and throbs, like it’s rebuking her for the effort put into saying it.
Johnny doesn’t answer the question. Instead he just keeps leaning, infuriatingly nonchalant, against the wall still, arms folded casually over his chest, and says casually, “That looks like it hurts.”
It’s not a question, it’s an observation. Rhetorical. In Dutch’s experience, people don’t say things like that unless they’re trying to trap you with them. Back you into a corner. She doesn’t recognize the corner she’s being backed into just yet, and it makes her nervous. It’s a bad idea to make a move until you know the terrain, so she just narrows her eyes further and doesn’t answer.
With an audible sigh, Johnny takes a step closer, crossing the invisible barrier that keeps them separated by a reasonable amount of space most of the time. She watches him do it and doesn’t chase him back across it right away, but there’s a tension she feels in her shoulders that she relies on to know that she’ll be ready to if the need arises.
“Look,” he announces, hands wide open and palms up, held out by his hips, “I can help. You know I can.”
Dutch’s own hand goes up towards her neck without her permission, reacting to the obvious direction of his words in a way that she hates more than she can describe. She pulls it down just as fast, balling it into a fist so hard she feels her nails biting into her palm. “I can handle it on my own.”
“No you can’t, come on, it’s on the back of your neck, that shit’s a pain in the ass even when it’s not somewhere you’ve gotta practically do gymnastics to reach. C’mon, let me help. It’ll take half the time and not even a fraction of the headache.” There’s a wheedling tone to Johnny’s voice that makes Dutch arch her eyebrows at him. The smile on his face doesn’t help. He seems like some kind of child, wading into a serious conversation he doesn’t recognize the gravity of. “Do you trust me?”
The question takes Dutch by surprise, and what’s even more surprising is the way she can’t answer it right away.
By all accounts she should be able to. It’s a ridiculous question. Trust is a luxury few can afford, and a risk Dutch hasn’t been stupid enough to take in a very long time. ‘No,’ she should say, immediate and hard, shutting down the idea on the spot.
Except… Except that she can’t do that. For whatever reason the word sticks in her throat and won’t come out right. There’s some kind of incomprehensible back and forth in Dutch’s mind pulling at the answer she somehow doesn’t know how to give, until eventually it settles and she’s able to say what she knows she should.
“...no, I don’t think I do,” is what she says, and it’s not anywhere near as confident as it should have been, half hesitation and all reluctance.
Johnny doesn’t seem phased by this. It’s like he’d known what the answer would be before he asked it and isn’t bothered by having received the expected response. He shrugs and still steps even closer anyway, arms rising from his sides a bit to gesture outwards, palms still up and open.
“Okay, sure. That’s fair. Why should you?” There’s a pause while he looks around, then says, “You don’t trust me, but I bet you do trust that you’re faster than me, right?”
No doubt or hesitation of any kind on that one at all, Dutch just tilts her chin and watches him, no idea where he’s going with this. Half the time she’s sure that this man is an incomprehensible lunatic. The other half the time, she doesn’t have the faintest idea what he is.
“Tell you what, then.” Johnny’s attention has stopped on a weapons rack across the room, and he points to it, then looks back at her, hand still held out with his index finger jabbing in the air towards the rack. “Dealer’s choice. You can hold any of those you want on me the whole time, but let me help. You don’t trust me. Give me a chance to prove that you can, yeah?”
Definitely an incomprehensible lunatic. However, he’d been right on the money with the guess that, if nothing else, Dutch trusts that she’s certainly faster than he is, in pretty much any given situation.
Which is how she ends up sitting on the floor, Johnny sitting behind her on a crate. It’s a highly unnerving place to sit, with someone behind and above her, and Dutch strains in something of an awkward position to keep an eye, to the best of her ability, on what he’s doing. Letting him out of her sight feels like a bad idea. Her hair is twisted up out of the way with a big clip, there’s a medical supply box open next to Johnny’s thigh, and Dutch has a gun trained square on his chest. He doesn’t seem the least bit phased by this.
When Johnny starts to cleans up the blood around the cut, he moves slowly, gently swiping a damp cloth over her skin until he’s wiped clear. It makes Dutch’s skin prickle strangely, like pins and needles. Her eyes sting, sharp and hot, and she’s confused by this reaction. It doesn’t hurt, not yet; he hasn’t even touched the cut. Yet the careful, kind touch of the cloth cleaning the blood off her skin, making no move to disturb any part of her shirt even though the mess extends down past the collar, is enough to have Dutch wobbling on the edge of tears. It’s disgraceful.
A soft apology comes when antiseptic stings the cut as Johnny disinfects it. He apologizes even though she hadn’t reacted. (Dutch has experienced far too much at this point to be bothered by such a little thing as that.) In fact, Johnny keeps up a narrative of everything he’s doing, talking like he’s battery powered and not about to stop any time soon.
He talks through the entire process, telling Dutch she’s lucky she doesn’t need stitches or staples, fingers warm on the back of her neck where he smoothes down the edges of the set of little strips he’s using to hold the wound closed before bandaging it. He says nothing about the gun, doesn’t even look at it, as far as Dutch can tell, which is unsettling in its own way. It makes her want to put it down so she can grab Johnny and shake him instead, ask him if he knows how reckless, how stupid, how dangerous that is. If he does know, he doesn’t seem to care.
“There you go,” Johnny announces when he’s taped the edges of the gauze patch down and deemed the job appropriately concluded. He’d stopped at one point, and she’d thought he’d finished, only for him to peel an edge back up and gingerly detach a small lock of hair that had gotten trapped in the adhesive. This time, he seems satisfied with his work, and he pats the back of her shoulder, hand staying there for longer than Dutch would’ve predicted she’d have let him. “All set. And look at that, you didn’t even need to shoot me about it or anything.”
Dutch puts down the gun so she can whack him in the shin, and he laughs, and she laughs too, and something in her loosens its grip.
---
Johnny did not have a good day today.
Well, neither of them had a good day, but Dutch is pretty confident in saying that Johnny’s went significantly worse than hers did. She got out of the whole mess with a small scrape on her elbow, barely taking off a layer of skin and not even bleeding enough to sacrifice a tissue to, whereas Johnny… Well, Johnny frankly got his ass kicked seven ways to Sunday.
When she’d found him, he’d been laying on his back on the ground, breathing hard and grimacing up at the sky while presumably attempting to locate the will to get up. The person or people who did it were long gone by that point but the evidence of what happened was there, in the form of kicked up dirt and the blood staining Johnny’s teeth cherry, dust-prints on the side of his shirt like someone, or maybe multiple someones, had driven their boot into his body over and over.
He’d been laughing it off since, limping heavily down the hall with a hand clutching bruised if not broken ribs, a kaleidoscope of deepening reds beginning to bloom over the side of his mouth and down his jaw, “Yeah, you should see the other guy though. Other guys. There were three, I think. Or maybe six? But I could’ve been seeing double by that point, so who knows.”
Dutch doesn’t think it’s funny.
She knows Johnny’s not as unbothered as he’s pretending to be, either. He wouldn’t accept the hand up she’d offered when she’d come across him, dodging it when she held it out and instead heaving himself upright slowly and painfully. That had been the first clue.
It wasn’t the only one. She’s seen it since too, after they’d finished up and gotten back aboard Lucy, the way there’s something strange in Johnny’s eyes, darting about too fast at everything around them. Everything he says is just like Dutch would expect it to be, joking and making light about things, but she’s too smart for this and she’s starting to know him well by now. It’s there in those darting eyes and the way Johnny’s keeping his back to the walls wherever he goes, like it’s instinct. Like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.
They may have been growing accustomed to each other by now but that doesn’t mean that Dutch has anything approaching an idea of what to do with this situation. She wants to, though. It’s a realization that takes her aback, to pinpoint the strange urge in her hands and the way her steps keep turning towards him as a desire to do something to help Johnny. There’s no accompanying instinct towards what to do, though, so Dutch is left to reluctantly let it go. She tells herself that he’ll talk if he needs to and leaves it alone.
Leaves it alone until now, that is. It’s late at night and Dutch is walking the halls because she can’t sleep and the restless energy has to go somewhere. She’s making circuits around the circumference of the ship and telling herself that it’s only because that’s how circles work that she keeps walking right past Johnny’s door. She’s making her third or fourth pass by Johnny’s room when she hears it. A loud thump like something heavy hitting the floor and what sounds to her like the bitten-off, breathless scream of landing on messed up ribs and a knee you already took a bad fall on once today.
Before Dutch has the time to overthink it she moves, opening up the door and rushing over to assess the nature of the help he so obviously needs. Just as soon as she actually goes to help, though, to do something constructive and useful to fix this, whatever it is, Dutch comes to an abrupt stop. Johnny had been on the floor when the door opened, laying on his right side and clutching at his left, where the worst of the damage to his ribcage is concentrated. That much she’d catalogued as soon as the door slid open, evaluating the situation as she would a combat scene. Anything beyond that basic degree of who-what-where processes on a slight lag, which is why she’s nearly across the room when she notices it.
As soon as there had been light flooding the darkened room from the hallway and then the shape of another person approaching silhouetted in it, Johnny had moved. Dutch stands there now, warning sirens blaring in her mind against a background of static, looking down at him, and what she sees makes her feel sick.
What Dutch sees is the way Johnny has abandoned trying to calm his damaged ribs, which are surely screeching from the impact of rolling off his bed, and instead lifted his hands up towards his face, his forearms crossed one over the other and his palms out towards her. He’s shielding his head. Johnny’s got his hands up shielding his head and his legs are moving, pushing against the ground in an effort to shove himself back as far away from Dutch as possible, completely without regard to the beating his body had taken that day.
Against the white-noise quiet of Lucy’s systems humming around them, Dutch can hear the way he’s breathing in loud, ragged gasps that barely half-fill his lungs, hampered by the injuries to his side and the panic making his hands shake so bad Dutch can see it even in the dim light. Dutch hasn’t made it this long in life without being able to notice things and put those things together, which has left her incapable of not knowing that Johnny is scared out of his mind. He’s terrified and trying to protect himself in any way he can, because he believes he’s about to be hurt.
And even though Dutch doesn’t know, she knows. She looks at Johnny, crumpled on the floor, in pain and knowing that more is coming any moment, and sees something in him that lives in her. She sees something cornered and hurting and viscerally, intimately familiar with laying on the ground while someone stronger than you looms over you, and knows.
So Dutch backs away. She doesn’t leave the room but she backs up, kneels down, and makes herself smaller.
“Johnny.” She says his name patiently. Her voice is nowhere close to yelling but loud enough to hopefully cut through whatever haze he’s in, having just woken up from what she’d hazard a guess was a deeply unpleasant dream into immediate panic. Dutch tries to sound gentle. Like a friend. “Johnny. It’s me. It’s just Dutch. Johnny. We’re here, on Lucy. In your room. It’s just us. Johnny. Johnny.”
Eventually, his hands go down far enough for Johnny to look at her. This allows her to see his face now, too, damp and flushed. His chest is still heaving for breath he still can’t get in all the way, which is only making him fight harder to get air, and he’s going to hurt himself worse at this rate. Which means Dutch has to do something. Just like the instinct that she’d had when she first heard him call out, so much pain and fear in his voice that it made her ribs feel cracked, she knows she has to do something.
Despite feeling totally, completely, startlingly out of her depth, Dutch is gonna try anyway. She’s going to try anyway because- because, well. It’s Johnny. Because he let her hold a gun on him if it meant he could help her with the cut on the back of her neck. Because he’d smiled at her with no blame in his eyes and said, You don’t trust me. Give me a chance to prove that you can, yeah?
Dutch inches closer across the floor, stopping dead when she bumps with a soft clatter into something that had been knocked off his nightstand and he flinches hard, hands flying back up over his face. She only continues again when he seems to have reached whatever debatable degree of calm seems possible right now, hands slowly, stiffly lowering back down to guard his injured torso once more. Settling on her knees next to him, her hands hovering close to her own body, Dutch isn’t sure how to do this. Stuck in between wanting to reach out but not being remotely sure she’d be welcomed, that’s when she asks the question.
“Do you trust me?”
Even though it cracks and breaks to pieces halfway through, even though Johnny is still practically hyperventilating, the near-immediate, thoughtless “Yes,” is clear and plain as day.
When she hears that, Dutch feels like she’s the one who can’t breathe. She stays down low, opting to crawl over to him rather than getting up to walk, which would have her towering over him again, and she’s just not going to be doing that. When she reaches where he lays on the ground, trying to breathe, Dutch gently takes hold of Johnny’s arm. The fact that he doesn’t flinch when she does feels enormous. It feels terrifying - like that ‘yes’ all over again. I trust you, Johnny is telling her, with his voice, with his body. I trust you. I trust you.
Dutch is as careful as she can possibly be, wringing from a part of herself that has long atrophied a tenderness she’d never have counted on being able to produce as she slips one hand under Johnny’s right side. There are far fewer bruises there but nothing like the damage done to his left side. With one hand bracing the unbroken side of his ribcage and the other pulling on his arm, Dutch is able to lever him upright with minimal effort on his part until they’re both sitting side by side on the floor next to his bed.
Now that he’s no longer prone on the ground Dutch can help support his damaged ribs and, more importantly, she can just… hold him. Johnny is shaking hard and he still can’t catch his breath. Every twitch and jerk of his body shakes Dutch too and she grits her teeth and holds on tighter. She’s half behind Johnny, one arm a solid line along his busted ribs while the other wraps around the front of his chest, her chin digging into the back of his shoulder. His hands have come up to clutch at her forearm. Dutch lets him cling to her as hard as he wants, holding back just as fiercely, only easing off a little when the bruised muscle of his side flinches away from a spot she’s bumped.
“You’re safe,” she mutters to him, low and fierce, right next to his ear. “You’re safe. We’re safe. Nothing can touch us here. I’ll- I’ll flay anything that tries.”
If she tried, Dutch couldn’t say who it is she’s promising to protect Johnny from. Not exactly. She’s got a few ideas, a couple of theories about who and what it was that haunted his sleep after he went to bed hurting all over after suffering a beating, but nothing concrete, and now is not the time to ask. Maybe one day she will ask. Not that long ago, Dutch wouldn’t have been able to imagine caring, let alone enough to think about bringing up something like that directly. Now… Things are different now.
For a long time they sit there on the floor together, waiting for Johnny’s breathing to slow and calm and his shaking to mostly subside. Eventually his fingers uncurl from around Dutch’s forearm and he pats her elbow, a nonverbal message that he’s good now, if she wants to go.
“Thanks,” Johnny says in a quiet, raspy voice. “You can… I’m good now, thanks. You don’t have to keep sitting here.” There’s a reluctance in the tension that’s returned to his body, and Dutch can tell he doesn’t want her to go. It’s not like he’s doing much to mask the want for her to stay, likely unable to with how shattered he must be by the events of the last day. Besides, she’s growing accustomed to reading him. Even if he’d tried to lie, she doesn’t think he’d have been able to fool her.
“You’re right,” Dutch announces, keeping her volume pitched to match his though there’s a steel in her words that hadn’t been present in his unsteady offer. She can feel him tense even further at the agreement, and she moves on before he has the chance to take her too directly at her word. “Neither of us should be on this stupid floor. This can’t be good for a person who got their ass kicked today. Back to bed we go, I think.”
There’s a small, shallow jerk of laughter in Johnny’s chest and Dutch smiles slightly, relieved that the gamble paid off and the joking reference to damage hadn’t done anything to hurt him. He pats her elbow again and nods, indicating his ascent to the plan. It’s easier to get him up off the ground than it had been to get him upright in the first place, and Dutch supports him while he gets settled back onto the mattress, laying on his significantly less injured side facing the edge of the bed. Without thinking too hard about it, Dutch makes a split-second choice and lays down beside him. It’s not a large bed but there’s enough room for them both. The cold of the wall seeps into Dutch’s skin through the thin fabric of her sleep shirt. She’s pressed against it, trying to give him space, just in case she’s read him wrong and he’ll be uncomfortable if she gets too close.
“You gonna stay?”
Dutch can’t see his face when he asks the question, left staring at the back of his head a few inches away from her. She can hear enough in his voice, though, and in the way he’s hugging himself loosely around the stomach. Johnny sounds tentative and uncertain, lightyears away from how she’s used to him sounding.
“Yeah,” she answers quickly, making her umpteenth instinct-based snap decision of the night and scooting over to close the distance between them. Carefully avoiding the deep contusions she knows hide under his shirt, the blood pooling where he’d been kicked enough times to crack bone, Dutch drapes an arm over Johnny’s waist. “Somebody’s gotta keep you from rolling out of bed again, right?”
His hand fumbles around in the dark until it finds hers, grabbing on and holding tight. Dutch lets her head drift forward until her forehead presses to the back of Johnny’s neck. His skin is still sleep-warm and she can feel his breathing against her chest. There’s a slight hitch in it still, like he’s not quite come down from the panic. She can’t figure out what, if anything, she ought to say to try and help him settle, so instead Dutch breathes in deep and slow, breathes out the same way, and hopes he can feel her calm as much as she can feel his anxiety.
It seems to work, and eventually Dutch can tell Johnny’s asleep again from the way he slumps back against her, leaving every battered inch of himself literally and metaphorically in her hands. Dutch’s hands are weapons, highly trained and lethal. She has a killer’s hands; Johnny knows this and he’s still laying here, injured, with his back to her, surrendering himself to them.
Do you trust me? Yes.
The thought strikes through Dutch’s chest, half-dismayed, half-protective, that thank all hells it was me you ended up with. Curled in this bed with Johnny now, remembering the look on his face when she’d asked him if he trusted her and then came to help him when he said that he did, Dutch thinks she understands something about him now. She’s got the feeling that Johnny maybe needed someone to trust, and while she doesn’t think she ought to be first on anyone’s list of people to place their faith in, she hates the thought of who else it could’ve been more.
Thinking of what she could have done to Johnny, how badly she could have hurt him when he’d answered that question is a prospect Dutch finds unexpectedly dizzying. She wouldn’t have, she knows she wouldn’t have, but she can’t say the same for literally anyone else. Johnny had trusted her with so little reliable proof to back it up, and Dutch in turn has concluded that there’s not another person in the galaxy she would trust with him right now.
There’s a quiet sound as Johnny shifts slightly in her arms, and Dutch makes a hushing noise in response, flattening her hand out over his chest to gently restrain him, keep him still so he doesn’t roll onto any of the more severe injuries.
“You can trust me,” Dutch promises into the back of Johnny’s collar, barely more than a breath. “Cross my heart.” She’s not sure how this is going to shake out for either of them, but at the very least this is one promise she intends with everything in her to keep.
---
“Will you come deal with this for me? I can’t get it at the right angle and I’m about to toss it out into space,” Dutch huffs, holding out the little piece of metal. It’s a hairpin, ornate and delicate, studded with little glittering stones. It’s fancy, and it’s beautiful, and it’s a pain in her ass. Her other hand is up behind her own head, holding her hair in place in the careful knot she’s twisted it into.
A few feet away where he’s been curiously watching her the whole time, Johnny starts a little when he realizes she’d been talking to him. As if there were literally anyone else aboard this ship Dutch could conceivably have been speaking to. He laughs a little, nervous, and asks, “Are you sure you want me to do that? I don’t know if I’d do it right, I might mess the whole thing up.”
“Yeah,” she tells him, keeping her voice carefully casual. Neutral. Like this is no big deal at all, except for all of the ways that it is. “I trust you.”
There’s a few seconds where he looks like a computer buffering, and Dutch almost, almost breaks the moment to make fun of him for it. Then Johnny’s face splits into a wide, bright smile and he steps closer, taking the hairpin from her outstretched hand.